Parlez-Vous Maths?
Maths teachers are always thinking of new ways to teach the subject. We’re constantly surprised at the ingenuity and variety of styles and methods that teachers use; but teaching maths in French - at a Scottish school - is new to us.
Maths genius Pierre de Fermat - coming soon… from Scotland?
The Herald piece reports that the initiative is part of the Early Primary Partial Immersion project, whereby students receive some of their subject classes in another language; in short, they get a bilingual education. Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s going to be a generation of french-speaking maths geniuses - like Pierre de Fermat - coming out of Walker Road Primary School, but it does mean those children gain confidence and skill in both subjects at the same time.
Philippe Couineaux, the francophone French teacher at Walker Road Primary School, explains that the children need to concentrate in class:
“The pupils have to learn to adapt in the classroom, which in turn increases their ability to adapt in their lives,”
An Aberdeen university study shows that students - naturally - improve their French scores as a result of this multilingual education, but they also do better in English. The study reports that the best results are obtained by continuing this language immersion through into secondary school.
It is presumably best to begin this bilingual education early, not least because language acquisition is a natural process for young children, but also because the early years curricula are dealing with fundamental concepts, and therefore less subject-specific.
In England Foundation and Year 1 maths students use words to compare sizes and capacities, count up and down and read and write numbers - all things you might do in an early English or French language class. Exploring these basic principles must be mutually beneficial - both in expanding vocabularies and in learning the maths.
Whether teachers and parents can use Maths-Whizz in other languages, for the moment, depends on their competence in those languages; but that’s not to say we won’t be releasing new language versions of Maths-Whizz.
If you use Maths-Whizz in other languages, or if you want to, comment on this blog post.