ERIC Number: ED396933
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1996-Apr-8
Pages: 19
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Teaching Mathematical Problem Solving to Students with Limited English Proficiency.
Kaplan, Rochelle G.; Patino, Rodrigo A.
Many mainstreamed students with limited English proficiency continue to face the difficulty of learning English as a second language (ESL) while studying mathematics and other content areas framed in the language of native speakers. The difficulty these students often encounter in mathematics classes and their poor performance on subsequent assessments of their learning of mathematics, therefore, is often unrelated to their potential for learning and understanding mathematics concepts and procedures. This study describes a program that attempts to utilize a blend of techniques from the fields of ESL or bilingual education and those of current practices in mathematics education focusing on communication in order to develop better mathematical problem solving approaches among upper elementary grade language minority students. An ethnographic study of one mathematics teacher and his approximately 30 sixth-grade students found that students with greater English competency did not demonstrate significant differences in their scores for problem solving in English and Spanish although there was a strong trend for scores to be higher in Spanish both at pretest and posttest times. (MKR)
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, NY, April 8, 1996).