RESEARCHING MULTILINGUALLY Nusrat Fatima Rizvi Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development
CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND• English as medium of instruction in Mathematics from Grade 4 and above• Students’ home language is usually either Urdu, which is the national language, or other regional languages.
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY• Existence of secondary school (10 years of schooling) mathematics curricula of diverse foci • curriculum focusing on developing students’ knowledge of fact and formulas and skills in carrying out routines computation • curriculum focusing on developing students’ conceptual understanding with emphasis on problem solving
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE The focus of this research was to study the impact of the curricula on mathematical reasoning of Year-11 students who had studied different curricula in earlier grades.
RESEARCH METHOD• Thinking aloud protocol in a clinical interview setting (interviews during solving novel problems)
MULTILINGUAL RESEARCH CONTEXTstudents moved from using English to codeswitching between English and Urdu which werethe common language between researcher andstudents.
STUDENTS’ MATHEMATICAL REASONING INMULTILINGUAL CONTEXT• Students’ reasoning was, to a great extent, linked with their understanding of when and how code switching between English and Urdu would be appropriate.• The students, when did code switching, generated qualitatively different reasoning from the reasoning they generated when they only used English.
STUDENTS’ MATHEMATICAL REASONING INMULTILINGUAL CONTEXTIt is also evident from the data that bilingualcontext provides students with opportunities tomediate with epistemological and cognitivebarriers which students usually encounter inlearning mathematics. The students who did codeswitching in a way that it became one hybridizelanguage got benefited the most.
DISCUSSION• Using sociocultural perspectives on interconnection between reasoning and speech and thinking as self-communication, this study presents anecdotes of conceptual change with the change of language and supports the argument that thought and language cannot be separated.
DISCUSSION• The languages carry with them culture-specific representations, metaphors and tools which people usually find hard to transfer in other languages and are usually lost when students completely swap from one language to another language.• However, those who mingle different languages as it becomes one hybridize language are usually able to get benefits of the reservoirs of different languages. However, it creates a dilemma for researchers to have to convert expressions of local languages in an academic language.
CONCLUSION• The arguments put in this paper can make one sceptic of many of the researches, which have been carried out with non-English speaking people and communities and reported in English, as they apparently tell the half-truth about mathematical reasoning and understanding within a specific linguistic background.
CONCLUSION• This paper set forth a need for a methodology which can capture language -specific representations and practices of mathematics and bring them in the domain of international research literature.