No abstract

The United Arab Emirates has been rapidly developing its educational institutions and trying to adopt a western system of higher education. The government has chosen English to be the medium of instruction in universities and thus has become a critical factor in student learning. In mathematics classes, it can be seen that students struggle to grasp concepts not just because of the actual content but also because of the language barrier. Language is intertwined with the multiple facets of mathematics education but one of the more salient areas is in comprehending mathematical text and problems. This paper attempts to summarize previous research findings that are related to this issue and describe problems faced by teachers using actual classroom cases. The conclusion of this paper outlines some tentative recommendations and a future research agenda to develop strategies to resolve these issues.

This paper presents a study of Emirati university students learning mathematics in a second language (English). The study focused on students' responses to mathematical word problems in different versions: simpler/more complex versions of the problem in English; an Arabic translation of the problem; and the addition of a picture to support the text of the problem. Our findings suggest that neither language simplification nor pictures significantly affect students' comprehension and performance on word problem assessments; the lexical and syntactic features of the word problems have little effect on their understanding and ability to answer the questions presented to them. In addition, evidence suggests that there is no first-language (Arabic) advantage when answering these assessments. These findings are in line with previous studies that found no evidence that simplifying the language of mathematics tests had a significant positive effect on student performance. Implications on the appropriate theoretical perspectives to use when studying the relationship of language and mathematics learning are discussed. In addition, practical recommendations are presented for instructors and professors in 'globalist' multilingual classrooms (Barwell, 2003).