Comments on: Bilingual math

By: Alida

Alida — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:36:37 +0000

I’m currently teaching my daughter in America to do math in both English and Spanish. I felt it was a better way for her to understand math and be able to express it in more than one way.

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 25 May 2011 06:17:45 +0000

I met a Chinese girl, who has been in AU for 5 years since high school and speaks English highly fluently. She told me she still uses L1 to do calculation in her accounting classes. However, the interesting phenomenon is while she speaks Mandarin, the structure of L2 is brought into L1. For example, 10,000, which should be Yi-Wan (one-unit for ten thousands) in Chinese, become Shi-Chian (ten-thousand) and so as the numbers upwards. To my surprise, it is not only her personal change but also the media in Australia. The Chinese newspapers in AU adopt this English-way whenever mentioning numbers. The pervasive change seems very functional. Immigrants live here, receive education, earn money and purchase here. It is much easier to just adopt English way of numbers and save the mental process of changing the unit back and forth because of the difference of languages, although it sounds so odd to other native Mandarin speakers.

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:34:11 +0000

The forms of languages significantly affect the way we think, and as a second language learner I sometimes feel like I should think with a different brain.

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:33:11 +0000

I’ve always been passionate about how the structures of languages influence people’s cognition and perception. Mathematics is one of the hot topics in the debate of Linguistic Relativity. As for my own experience, I also need to translate English to Mandarin to do math, especially when it comes to 10,000 and the multiples of 10,000, because we have a word for 10,000 in Mandarin and we treat it as a unit in calculation. There is also study showing that English children are slower when learning irregular numbers such as eleven and twelve, while Chinese children are not because numbers in Mandarin are very consistent. The forms of languages, the carriers of meanings, are analogous to the notation of math. In Calculus, Newton and Leibniz were major contributors; however by using Newton’s notation the development of mathematics in Britain stagnated for 150 years, while Leibniz’s notation has been widely used until today. The forms of languages significantly affect the way we think, and as a

By: Clare Maree

Clare Maree — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:42:00 +0000

When my son started school (here in Australia) 6 years ago, I was similarly dissatisfied with the lack of rote learning in maths in the early grades (and yes, I think your choice of word, disdain is spot on), which I think has made progress in maths learning here unnecessarily slow. Thanks to attending Japanese school on Saturdays, however, my two children learned the times tables up to nine in a matter of weeks in 2nd grade by learning the ku-ku, a super efficient way of reciting the times tables that is drummed into all Japanese school children in the 2nd year of primary school. They are now able to solve multiplication and division problems must faster than their peers and they are both high achievers in maths in general at their day school. This was not a conscious aim when we started our childrens bilingual journey (my husband is Japanese, I am Australian, our children were born in Australia but we speak only Japanese at home), but it is certainly an added benefit.

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 10 May 2011 11:55:44 +0000

Your experience of having to mentally translate German numbers into the English order is interesting, Ingrid. I had always accepted the notion that when a multilingual person performs any kind of mathematical calculation they will always revert to the language through which they first became numerate. That is until I met my husband, whose mother tongue is Persian but uses his second language of Japanese for everything numeric, even though he did not encounter that language until he was in his 20s, and despite the fact that Japanese uses 10,000 as a basic unit. My son, on the other hand, became numerate first in Japanese, up to three digits and beyond using the Montessori golden beads. Now, after two years in an English educational setting, he seems to be functioning in English for all mathematical work, though I suspect there is still a process of translation happening.

By: Amanda Kendle

Amanda Kendle — Tue, 10 May 2011 05:55:10 +0000

Great post, Ingrid, on a topic of great interest to me! I used to work in maths education here in Australia and then lived overseas for some years; since I’ve come back and now have a baby, I’ve heard that they no longer teach the times tables by rote and I was a little shocked. I am a major supporter of non-rote-learning *except* in some situations, and surely the times tables are something that should be learnt by rote. (It sounds like you need no convincing!). It seems like rote learning has become the devil unnecessarily. Anyway my additional interest is that our family language is German (my husband is German) so it’s interesting to see your perspective. Thanks!

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 10 May 2011 05:49:50 +0000

Thanks, Ahmad! Obviously, you can have too much of a good thing and many educational systems suffer from on over-reliance on rote learning. However, just because it is used excessively in some context doesn’t mean it’s bad per se. It’s a very efficient way to acquire some sorts of knowledge such as the multiplication tables. Will try and elaborate in a future blog post 🙂

By: Ahmad

Ahmad — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:21:01 +0000

Thanks Ingrid. It is amazing that you value the use of rote learning in education. I wish you elaborate on this issue more, but in the meantime I will pass your story to our educators who consider rote learning as a bad thing although it is inherently part of our literacy practice.