Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 2

Focus on Meaning

Of course, when you are teaching a subject, the most important thing you want the student to understand is your content, in other words, the meaning of what you are teaching.

If the student does not have (or realize that she has) sufficient embedded context to understand the meaning, it is the teacher's job to make sure that the she has the background information necessary to take on the challenge of learning new content.

Since I will be teaching Math (I haven't found a job yet, so I have no classes where i can try out these things) whatever I write here will be theoretical when it comes to Math.

As I quoted in the previous post, if you're a great teacher of, say, math, to the "standard" student, but leaving the Standard English language learners behind, you're not a great teacher. If most of your kids get it somehow, there's still that group who didn't, and maybe could have, if they'd had the necessary background to understand it.

With math the problem could be poor preparation in elementary or middle school. It could be a parent who told the child that she always hated math. It could be that the child missed out on some important part of math because he moved from one district to another and they were doing things in a different order. (That happened to me. I moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania in April of my Junior year. I had no problems in most of my subjects, but in math, they had already had coordinate geometry and we were just about to get to it in my Ohio school, so I had to learn it on my own. Even now, many years and many math classes later, I still feel some strange insecurity there.)

So what's a math teacher supposed to do?

The good thing is that math is very symbolic, and pretty much the same despite the language. Of course, there are differences.

• Where we write 2,456.25 most of the rest of the world writes 2.456,25, which is certainly confusing. In some countries, division is not indicated by / but by :
• In Denmark, subtraction is indicated by ÷.
• In Denmark, Ø is a letter (and also the word for "island," not a number.
• Many Europeans write one with a little flag to the left (like our 7) and cross their 7's so they don't look like ones.
• Since I had math in school and college prior to the advent of calculators and computers, we never talked about negative numbers as "negative two" but as "minus two." I think the new nomenclature came partly because of the advent of number lines (which we also didn't use) and the different keys for "negative" and "minus" on a calculator keyboard (which have been a hassle for me!)

Those are just simple things that might floor a good math student from another country.

For students L1 is a European language, they probably know a lot of the math vocabulary already, or at least they will recognize most of it. But a student from an Asian country most likely has to learn the entire math vocabulary even though she can do the symbolic math.

In most cases the students have some prior knowledge of math that the teacher can help them activate in various ways that have already been discussed. If a student has not been exposed to the necessary mathematical background, then it is necessary to find help to bring the child up to speed. Since the rest of the class will be moving on, this puts an enormous pressure on the child who is trying to catch up.

Cummins suggests a sequence for introducing new content, which can also have some application in math:

1. Experiential phase - to activate background knowledge
2. Literal phase - finding out what the text in the book says literally (as in explaining what a word problem is looking for.)
3. Personal phase - relating to the student's own experience (which might be difficult in some areas of math.)
4. Critical phase - drawing inferences and exploring generalizations.
5. Creative phase - translating the previous phases into creative action, like solving the problem or extending a math concept to something else.
   (Cummins, p 134)

Other ideas he suggests which could be used in math are

• Use visuals to stimulate discussion
• Use manipulatives and multimedia presentation
• Share prior experiences with people of diverse backgrounds (like those number and operator difficulties I mentioned above.)
• Writing activities that focus students' prior knowledge - a bell-work assignment?
• Linking prior knowledge to knew concepts, which is something so basic for teaching that I wonder why it's even mentioned.
  (Cummins, p 135-6)

HELP Math for Spanish/English bilingual students

I happened on an interesting website the other day, called HELP, aimed at Spanish/ English bilingual children learning math in grades 3-8. I signed on for the 21-day free trial so I could see how it works. There is a little story with animal-like children doing things in real life, and then transfering that to a math lesson. For this page, Maria walks every day and keeps track of how far she goes in a table of values and a bar graph. When the student clicks the the button "En esta pagina" at the top right, a speaker tells about the page or the sequence in Spanish, giving an oral background to what the student is learning. The middle button on the bottom is a glossary of key terms with explanation in English and Spanish and always an example.So the student gets background knowledge in Spanish, hears the story in English, and can check key terms in both languages, which is right after the book! Evidently it is possible to aquire the program for your school with Title I, II, etc. grants. It looks like a useful program.

But what do we do for the children who speak a language that isn't Spanish?

I plan to look for textbooks in the languages of my bilingual students, so they have a reference work to check with. Conceivably there will also be math materials in those languages on line. My students could help search for materials in their languages.