The Mathematics-Language Proficiency: The Learners’ Perspecctive

Mathematics is considered a difficult school subject by majority of learners. For many learners, mathematics is a series of hurdles and challenges-a task made with continued failure and seeming irrelevance in spite of the value that mathematics plays in society. The effect of this has been unwilling class participation, disinterestedness, haphazard solving of mathematical tasks, plus low achievements and failure to communicate mathematics. The latter effect is important in application of mathematics in occupations such as building, construction, engineering and accounting. This state of affairs propagated the topic of the paper: “The Mathematics-Language Proficiency: The Learners’ Perspective”. The objective was to find out the nature of the relationship between proficiency in mathematics vocabulary and conceptual understanding of mathematics. The study drew on Vygotskian Socio-Cultural Theory (SCT) and used a multiple-case study design. The sample size of the study was 1353 participants comprising of 1339 form three learners and 14 mathematics teachers drawn from Sub-County Schools (SCS), County Schools (CS) and Extra-County Schools (ECS) in Bungoma South Sub- County. Data were collected by questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews. Analysis was done using Pearson correlation with two tailed tests for all the tests with a level of significance of 0.01. The study found out that there exists a strong positive relationship between mathematics vocabulary and conceptual understanding across all cases, that is, 0.798, 0.778 and 0.709 in SCS, CS and ECS respectively. Further learners were unable to interpret the meaning of some mathematics solutions after solving the question correctly. The study concluded that proficiency in mathematics vocabulary is necessary but not sufficient for conceptual understanding of mathematics. The study recommends learners to be supported in communicating mathematics ideas both verbally and in writing during mathematics lessons to broaden their conceptual understanding of mathematics.