How do fifth graders understand the language of mathematics textbooks?
A significant and insufficiently studied problem in the education in our country is the quality of textbook language. It is vital to address the issue from students’ perspective (to whom this teaching aid is primarily intended), which, among other things, enables to analyse whether the t...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | srp |
| Published: |
Institute for Educational Research, Belgrade
2022-01-01
|
| Series: | Zbornik Instituta za pedagoška istraživanja |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0579-6431/2022/0579-64312201005R.pdf |
| Summary: | A significant and insufficiently studied problem in the education in our
country is the quality of textbook language. It is vital to address the
issue from students’ perspective (to whom this teaching aid is primarily
intended), which, among other things, enables to analyse whether the
textbook presents the support for students to learn, but also to examine the
extent to which the textbook can help students improve their basic
abilities, primarily linguistic and cognitive. Therefore, the aim of this
paper is to examine how fifth graders understand the language of mathematics
textbooks. Students (N = 209) of the said age from three Belgrade primary
schools participated in the research. The students were asked to mark
language units whose meaning they did not understand in two lessons (studied
and nonstudied) in mathematics textbooks. The results indicate that there
are several types of linguistic units that students evaluate as
incomprehensible: words, syntagms, and sentences. They also reveal that the
students understand better the language of familiar than that of unfamiliar
lesson, which indicates that they would not be able to master the knowledge
from these textbooks independently. In the familiar lesson, significantly
more students do not understand words and syntagms belonging to general
lexical system of Serbian language. In the unfamiliar lesson, however,
significant percentage of students does not understand meanings of the
sentences used (seven sentences in average). The students with a better
grade in mathematics marked fewer unclear sentences in both familiar and
unfamiliar lesson. The obtained results could be used in improving the
quality of the language in mathematics textbooks, as well as in raising
students’ language competence. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0579-6431 1820-9270 |