TEACHING MATHEMATICS IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT IN THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

Abstract

It is acknowledged within the field of mathematics education that language plays an important role in the learning, teaching, and doing of mathematics. Language is defined to be a system of linguistic rules and texts, and particularly, an array of contexts of use for many kinds of rules and texts (Morgan, 2013, p.1).Mathematics is taught around the world in many different languages, which are different from the mother language. The language of instruction might be a second or a third language. The choice of some countries of what second language or languages to use in schools and universities depends on issues of access, power and dominance (Edmonds-Wathen, Trinick, and Durand-Guerrier, 2016, p.1).In fact; many post-colonial countries keep using the language of the colonizer country as the language of instruction. As a result, there has been a worldwide trend for schooling in English or in another of the world’s dominant languages such as French, Russian, Spanish or Chinese (Edmonds-Wathen, & all.2016, p.1). Language has been a topic of research in mathematics education for a long time (Morgan,2013, p.1), so what role does the language play in the processes of doing mathematics and producing mathematics knowledge? An important issue is the challenge in translating mathematical terms (Durand-Guerrier, Kazima, Libbrecht, Njomgang Ngansop, Salekhova, Tuktamyshov, and Winsløw, 2016, p. 1). It is claimed that language has a special role in relation to mathematics because the entities of mathematics are not accessible materially; it means we know that subjects of mathematics are abstract, so languages are important to help a student to understand any subject in mathematics. Mathematics language is different from natural language, a ‘set’ in mathematics is different from a ‘group’, while in natural language these words have almost the same meaning, a ‘function’ in mathematics has particular definition and is different from the concept of function in a natural language, the same is for ‘space’, ‘distance’, rational, and many other words used in mathematics. Moreover, as stated before, when we shift from a language to another, many words do not have the same meaning in different languages.