Teaching the concept of zero in a Malawi primary school: illuminating the language and resource challenge

Abstract

In this paper we discuss findings of a study that investigated the resources and language that teachers in Malawi use to teach the concept of zero. In Malawi primary schools, textual resources available to teachers are mainly the curriculum materials in the form of syllabus, teacher guides and learner textbooks. The syllabus and teacher guides are in English while the learner textbooks are in Chichewa as teaching is in Chichewa or other local language in the first 4 years of primary school. We used the Mediating Primary Mathematics framework (Venkat and Askew in Educ Stud Math 97:71–92, 2018) and a qualitative case study of two teachers to explore the resources used, how the teachers interacted with the resources and how they moved between the two languages. Our findings include that the language and resources that the teachers used provided affordances as well as constraints for learning the concept of zero. We identified two types of challenges for the teachers; that of naming and that of representing the concept of zero. We discuss what the Malawi context illuminates about teaching zero in post-colonial multilingual settings.

Informal Assessment of Preschool Children’s Concepts of Zero

“…Rather than using an unfamiliar formal assessment process (e.g., Bialystok & Codd, 2000;Hartmann et al, 2022;Kazima et al, 2023;Wellman & Miller, 1986) such as the 'give-N task', we were interested in exploring whether an informal, open-ended inquiry would facilitate children's individualised responses to questions. This approach takes into account that more open-ended approaches to encouraging children to demonstrate mathematical thinking than experimental designs may elicit unexpected representations of mathematical thinking (Cohrssen & Pearn, 2019;Deans & Cohrssen, 2015;Pollitt et al, 2020).…”

“…Data were collected mid-year. The children's educators are more familiar to the children than the researchers, and the educators were deemed more likely to elicit an authentic response to questions from children than a formal assessment process (e.g., Bialystok & Codd, 2000;Hartmann et al, 2022;Kazima et al, 2023;Wellman & Miller, 1986). Educators, each accompanied by one researcher, approached children one at a time during free play morning sessions, introduced the accompanying researcher to the children (the first and third authors were already known to the children) and explained that we were interested in how much they knew about numbers.…”

“…It is, thus, necessary for early childhood educators to purposefully introduce children to zero as a concept and to progress their understanding of zero from solely representing the absence of something to understanding zero as a number; that is, treating the concept of nothing as a numerical quantity. This is complex thinking as it requires children to understand both the concept of an empty set and the concept of zero as a number (Kazima et al, 2023). One strategy for early childhood educators to explore the concept of zero may be the use of five-frames and concrete manipulatives as these provide opportunities to rehearse the counting principles as well as to notice visual representations of numbers from zero to five (McGuire et al, 2012).…”