Bilingual Education: What Role for Mathematics Teaching?

Abstract

The first bilingual schools in the United States were established prior to 1850 (Andersson and Boyer 1970) and bilingual education has existed in some form since that time. In recent years the field has expanded greatly and the literature on bilingual education has increased correspondingly, most of it focusing on general issues of language development and on the specific areas of language arts, reading, and social studies. Very little has been written specifically on the role of mathematics in bilingual classrooms. Not only must interested teachers search for isolated bits and pieces of information, but they also frequently discover that mathematics educators in many cases have been left out of the planning and implementation of bilingual programs.