A study of the responses of culturally different pupils to mathematics vocabulary
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Date
1995
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Abstract
This study examined the effects of second language in the learning of mathematics by the black pupils. The first aim was to investigate pupils' understanding of the meaning of words found in their text books. The second aim was to determine the level of difficulty experienced by pupils in learning the meaning of mathematical terms. The third aim was to find out whether mathematics performance is influenced by any particular respondents' characteristics. To this end, an achievement test with three subtests was administered to a representative sample of black pupils doing mathematics at standard nine and ten.
The first subtest (TEST A) consisted of questions that
require pupils to define concept found in their
textbooks. The second subtest (TEST B) was designed to
elicit dual conceptualisation from a pupil, i.e. a pupil
responded by defining a concept or by means of a
diagram. The third subtest (TEST C) consists of descriptions of concepts. The pupil had to respond by a word to each description.
A large percentage of black pupils did not perform very
well in all mathematics tasks. They made best
responses by means of diagrams, but did poorly in
language expression. This is an indication that
culturally different pupils * poor performance in mathematics tasks, is due to language limitations. Further on there is no relationship between language and spatial tasks.
The present study revealed that standard nine and ten pupils have problems in defining concepts that are found in their mathematics text books. They also fail to associate a concept with a description. The causes for these problems are varied. It may be due to language that it is restricted to the classroom situation or the methods used in teaching new concepts are to culturally different pupils.
Results also indicated that performance of pupils is
less influenced by variables like sex and age than by
class, stream and mathematics grade. It has been found
that age has no influence on the performance of
mathematics tasks. The performance of all age groups
is the same. It was found that the performance of boys
and girls does not differ. On the other hand, standard
ten pupils' achievement was better than that of standard
nine pupils. In the same vein, the science group
pupils did better than the general and commerce pupils. Pupils doing higher grade mathematics also showed better performance than pupils taking standard grade mathematics.
Description
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Education in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in the Department of Philosophy of Education
at the UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND, 1995.
Keywords
Mathematics--Study and teaching.