Math-Whizz Blog

The Seattle Times reports on a teaching method growing in popularity in the city’s elementary classrooms – teaching math with Chinese or Spanish.

Learning math with chinese - a successful tactic in Seattle classrooms

The Seattle Times looks at some first grade students being taught basic math and science entirely in Mandarin Chinese, despite the children’s almost universal unfamiliarity with the language, in a seemingly successful attempt to boost both language and math skills.

At Beacon Hill International School, many students learn a second language along with their ABCs by spending half of each school day immersed in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish….

…In the afternoon, these students will move to another classroom to study reading, writing and social studies in English. But in the morning, they learn math and science in Mandarin, picking up the language through repetition and physical cues from Wu.

The approach seems to work despite (or even thanks to) the students’ split learning demands, relying on the basic qualities of elementary math and sciences, and the natural propensity of young children to acquire languages.

Beacon Hill International’s teachers hope the two-language approach will lead to academic gains for all their students, especially the school’s many immigrant children, who often fall behind academically while they still are learning English.

There’s research to bolster that hope. At John Stanford, for example, the school compared students in its first Spanish-English class with those who were one grade ahead and taught only in English. On the state’s fourth-grade test, the children in the Spanish-English program scored about 20 percentile points higher in reading and math.

And there are signs that the approach also helps boost confidence.

A similar approach at a Scottish school saw students’ math grades improving when they learned the subject.

You can sort of see how this might work when you look at kindergarten and first-grade math (including the material we teach in our online tutoring at Math-Whizz) – early math deals a lot in the language of number and basic techniques of describing the world in numeric terms.

Learning English or Chinese or Spanish words for numbers to ten, or comparative measures, might be somewhat irrelevant – the key is that the children form the concepts effectively and learn them well. There might be no better mnemonic hooks for basic math than sing-song Chinese and Spanish. There are likely many other reasons for this that I could guess at, but I’ll leave that to the experts.

These stories demonstrate that we underestimate children’s learning potential at our peril, and that sometimes stretching kids in novel ways has some surprising knock-on effects, and that is something we know well at Math-Whizz…