American students’ math scores have been the source of much consternation for politicians and educators alike and a source of endless debate about how to improve our students’ math ability when compared to students from other countries.
by misspiepie
What if our students have a built in disadvantage in math based on the language they speak?
What if speaking and therefore thinking in English hampers our students mathematically ability?
Author Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers:The Story of Success, explores these interesting questions.
There is a huge difference in the way number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed.
“In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t.
We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the ‘decade’ first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen).”
Now imagine how hard it is for the native English speaker to makes sense of these strange inconsistencies as they grow up, but imagine the difficulties of second language learners. So, the Western languages’ inconsistencies create built in math difficulties. In other words, the very way we speak numbers is creating learning problems for our students.
“The number system is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.”
Add thirty-seven plus twenty-two.
“Ask an English-speaking seven-year old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math…Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine."
It is much easier to hold the second written equation in your head because of the logical nature of the system.
“That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.”
So by nature of our language structure, our students are a year behind in math by the time most start school.
Doesn’t it make sense that if math is understood in a much more systematic way, as opposed to a clumsy, complicated, and arbitrary linguistic structure that students may enjoy math a little more. And if they enjoy math a little more they will try a little harder to solve a problem or spend a little more time on it. And if they try a little harder on each and every problem or spend a little more time to arrive at the solution before giving up. Maybe that student would enjoy math more and take more math classes or more challenging math classes.
And if a student did that year after year, what would be the difference in math ability between one who did and one who did not?
According to Gladwell that makes all the difference. And knowing that fact might make the difference for our students. And knowing that difference and figuring out ways to account for that difference through new ways of teaching math to our students would be a needed change.
That would be Education Innovation.
by {Jadranka}
I like this idea a lot as it could open minds to exploring new possibilities. Are you aware of any research on this, apart from what Gladwell wrote?
Posted by: John Moravec | December 08, 2008 at 07:59 AM