Teaching mathematics to English Language Learners (ELL students) has become a challenge faced by an increasing number of U.S. teachers. Between 1979 and 2004, the number of K–12 students who spoke a language other than English at home increased from 3.8 million to 9.9 million. During that same time, the number of K–12 students who had difficulty speaking English increased from 1.3 million to 2.8 million (U.S. Department of Education 2006). Even teachers who may speak a second language still face the daunting task of teaching mathematics effectively to ELL students. I was one of those teachers. From 1995 to 1999, I taught at a high school in Southern California where the student population was 56 percent Hispanic. I spoke Spanish and was hired in part to teach mathematics to ELL students. I taught my classes in English. My school had no materials for use in an ELL class with Spanish speakers, and I could not find a textbook company that offered such materials. I was also not eager to spend enormous amounts of time trying to translate mathematics texts.
Despite the rapidly growing population of English language learners in U.S. colleges and schools, very little research has focused on understanding the challenges of English language learners specifically in statistics education. At a university near the United States-México border, the authors conducted an exploratory qualitative case study of issues of language in learning statistics for pre-service teachers whose first (and stronger) language is Spanish. The two strongest findings that emerged from cross-case analysis of the interviews were the importance of the role of context (the setting in which information is communicated) and the confusion among registers (subsets of language). This paper overviews and synthesizes relevant literature and offers resources and recommendations for teaching and future research.
First published November 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives
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