The effectiveness of home language medium instruction on improving primary school students' mathematical performance

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of home language as the medium of instruction on improving primary school students' mathematical performance. It aimed to determine whether giving instruction in their home language to Kunwinjku speaking pupils, part of Australia's Indigenous populations, would improve their mathematical learning. In particular, this study investigated the positive impact of home language medium instruction on learning number ordering and spatial language. This study is concerned with the implication of home language medium instruction on teaching mathematics in a diglossic, multilingual community. The project is a cross-linguistic comparative study. The central hypothesis of the study was that indigenous students would improve their mathematical learning outcomes in English after being instructed in their home language. To test this hypothesis, the study employed two experiments in two different geographical contexts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the Animals in a Row matching task was administered. This research tool was developed based on the instructions devised by the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. A total of 12 school aged children, consisting of six English monolingual and six Kunwinjku speaking students, participated in the experiments. The findings of the study show that the primary school students' results improved in mathematics tasks after receiving instruction in their home language. In the pretest, before Kunwinjku instruction was employed, students scored lower (35 percent) than the average mark. But, more than 80 percent of participants (5 out of 6) improved their scores by 15 percent after being instructed in Kunwinjku, increasing from 35 to 55 percent. The results also show that the concepts of 'before', 'after', 'front' and 'behind' in mathematics can be taught effectively if they are instructed in students' home language. The ratings of correct answers for the tasks corresponding to 'behind' and 'front' were higher after Kunwinjku instruction. This finding concords with the significance of culturally responsive education in which both a child's home language and cultural experience have a dominant role. Further, findings from the experiments suggest that primary school students have a better understanding to the medium of instruction and culture embedded in it in order to improve their mathematical performance. A connection between new and prior knowledge can be established by the use of home language as the medium of teaching that facilitates students' learning and leads to better results. Therefore, this study contributes significantly to the body of scholarship related to home language based bi/multilingual education programmes.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English