Paper short abstract:

My paper for the mathematics panel would use this material in two ways. Drawing on experiments with maths club examples in the Baale classroom, suggestions could be made about teaching modes that could make bridges between local and formal school maths. Less concretely, it would be interesting to look at both the similarities and differences between transfer of L1 literacy skills and L1 maths skills to later school work.

Paper long abstract:

The reading research began when sitting in on grade four classes in several government schools made it obvious that children were not really learning there. This was not surprising, since children learned to read only in the national language, English.

Observations, grounded in video filming, were the main form of data collected from classrooms, and from their communities. During one observation in the Birifour upper primary classroom in Baale, the pupils clearly understood little of the mathematics lesson on how to calculate profit and loss. The parallel with the failure to understand enough English to learn to read was striking. With reading, the longitudinal scheme for LLIL classrooms clearly showed that reading skills learned in L1 transferred effectively to the second language, English. It seems you only have to learn to read once . The problem was whether, and in what ways, children's already established local maths skills would assist them to understand formal maths.

In order to get some idea of how these boys and girls thought about school mathematics problems, a 'maths club' was started on Saturdays (following Mike Cole's research model). Each pupil identified a market-influenced activity that s/he was actively involved in. Later, selected Maths club cases were used to construct 'Profit and loss' problems in the English-language maths class.