Approaches to scaffolding in teaching mathematics in English with primary school students in Colombia

Abstract

Teaching mathematics in a second-language (L2) environment requires teachers to understand both relevant mathematics concepts and the L2. Teachers must be aware that the explanations, clarifications, and development of mathematical language require that students have sufficient competence in the L2 to understand what is being taught. This implies teaching language to students in three specific ways, as suggested by Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (2010): language of learning, language for learning, and language through learning. Teaching mathematics also requires teachers to apply different types of scaffolding. This study seeks to identify the types of scaffolding and instructions used by the mathematics teacher at a bilingual school in Santa Marta, Colombia teaching first-grade students in English. Classroom observations, as well as interviews and classroom observation checklists, were carried out to determine what the mathematics teacher was already doing in the classroom in terms of scaffolding. The resultant data suggests that a range of visual aids and careful use of the L1 can play significant role in supporting the simultaneous development of content and linguistics competences.

Graphic art, Philosophy and Bilingualism as a result of research at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Humanities

“…At the local context, Corzo & Robles (2011) conducted a study about the integration of mathematics in which the types of scaffolding and instructions given by a teacher of a first grade of a bilingual school in Santa Marta, were investigated. By means of class participation, observations, and interviews, the researchers found how visual aids and the use of Spanish helped in the development of language and content.…”

Content and language integrated learning in Latin America 2008-2018: Ten years of research and practice

“…Other studies have been conducted by researchers involved in CLIL implementation through broader projects (e.g., Amado Valdivia, 2012;Porto, 2016). From a critical perspective, Latin American CLIL research tends to be qualitative, case-study based (e.g., Tavella & Banegas, 2016), and descriptive-exploratory of wider benefits and drawbacks in CLIL implementation (e.g., Corzo Zambrano & Robles Noriega, 2011).…”

“…This feature is found not only in studies between -2010(e.g., Pistorio 2009) but also in more recent studies (e.g., Keogh, 2017), which may signal that while European CLIL has narrowed down the scope of CLIL to learning content through an L2 (Ball et al, 2015), Latin American CLIL gravitates between the language-driven and, to a lesser extent, content-driven approaches. Upon scrutiny of the focus of each publication, we identified 37 studies which explore CLIL as a language-driven approach for teaching English as a foreign language (e.g., Czischke Alvarez, 2013), and 20 studies which examine CLIL implementation for the teaching of content such as history (e.g., Lara Herrera, 2015;Ravelo, 2013), science (e.g., Gamero-Calderón, 2017, Garzón-Díaz, 2018Leal, 2016), geography (e.g., Costa-Rau, 2016), math (e.g., Corzo Zambrano & Robles Noriega, 2011), first aid (e.g., Finardi, Silveira, & Alencar, 2016, business (e.g., Gardner, 2009) or ELT methodologies (e.g., De la Barra et al, 2018).…”

Application of Vygotsky’s SCT in Chinese EFL Classroom

“…It affirms the importance of teaching and emphasizes what the teacher taught should go beyond the student's current cognition, and it is considered as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) [7]. The sociocultural theory also values collaboration in learning, arguing the importance and significance of the interaction between learners and the environment surrounding them [8].…”