Combining Math and

Chinese Immersion
Multiplies Benefits

(lifesizeimages/istockphoto)

By Heather Clydesdale
Teachers today face a conundrum: they lack the hours needed to help
students master requisite proficiencies. This burden is amplified for
those teaching language immersion classes. Some split their students

school day with an English teacher, and most must use additional time
to explain concepts and build skills in a language that is not students
mother tongue. Some experts, however, are proving that math and
language immersion can be a formula for efficiency in learning both
subjects. Asia Society spoke with educators from Utah and educators
from Minnesota shared their strategies for combining these two
subject areas.
Sandra Talbot, project director for the Utah Chinese Dual-Immersion
Elementary Programs, says that the ambitious scope of Utahs
immersion initiative, launched four years ago, prompted state
administrators to seek creative ways to combine math and language.
First, they sought a curriculum flexible enough to suit the different
programs of ten districts, ultimately selecting the enVisionMATH
Common Core product by Pearson because it was topic-driven. If
there was a school district that was using GO Math or Math
Expressions, says Talbot, we could use a Chinese enVisionMATH topic
that the teachers would be able to align successfully with the math
topic that was being taught by the other grade-level classrooms.
EnVisionMATH textbooks are also available in Chinese for first through
fourth grades, with versions for higher grades expected in the near
future. Since Utah uses a fifty-fifty immersion model, where the day is
split between two separate teachers giving English or Chinese
instruction, a dual-language curriculum makes it easy for educators to
coordinate their efforts.
Utah curriculum developers also used enVisionMATHs story problems
to create descriptive lesson plans that identify content and language
objectives as well as vocabulary, explains Tessa Dahl, coordinator of
the Utah Sate Office of Educations Chinese Dual Language Program.
Dahl notes that her favorite part of these plans is suggested talk for
both teachers and students, which helps young learners connect math
concepts to relevant language describing their own experiences. The
lessons also guide teachers in supporting students as they master
story problems: first by teacher-modeling, then by asking students to
supply a small amount of data, and gradually encouraging them to
identify and organize the information in order to solve such problems
themselves.
Another product that Talbot and Dahl have successfully introduced to
support math in language immersion is Every Day Counts Calendar
Math. Since Dahl herself is a former elementary school and language
immersion teacher, she is sensitive to the practical needs of educators.
She explains that teachers can easily adapt Every Day Counts

activities into Chinese and integrate the pictures along with gestures to
help novice learners grasp new words, concepts, and patterns. Its
more than a calendar; it's a starter to your day, Dahl remarks. You
can go over the weather, the colors, the shapes. Its great because its
routine.
When combining math and Chinese immersion, teachers (and parents
or tutors) should be mindful of the disparate ways these languages
treat certain concepts, and the confusion this can create for students.
For instance, when speaking about fractions in Chinese, the
denominator is identified first, followed by the numerator, a pattern
that is inverted in English. For large numbers, the groupings are
different, with Chinese building on or ten-thousand, while English
uses multiples of one-thousand.
These impediments are minor, however, and are outweighed by the
fact that Chinese is particularly literal when describing math concepts.
Ping Peng, Chinese immersion department chair and second-grade
teacher at Minnetonka Public Schools, points out that the word for
pentagon, for example is five side shapewhile adjacent
angle is , or neighbor angle. Peng claims the way the Chinese
language treats math concepts is a factor in the measureable
advantages in math proficiency that both native speakers as well as
learners of Chinese as a second language enjoy.
At Minnetonka Public Schools, Peng and her colleagues, first-grade
immersion teachers Tingting Mei and Jing Zhao, integrate the Shu Xue
Chinese mathematics book (the standard elementary math textbook
used across mainland China) with Everyday Mathematics, and use
Math in Focus as a supplementary resource. They leverage story
problems to achieve language goals, such as how to describe speed
and direction, as well as temporal and spatial relationships, and they
also give students variations on problems to ensure that concepts are
fully understood and mastered.
This kind of cross-checking is what ultimately makes the fusion of
Chinese-language and math so effective. Yet, as educators in Utah and
Minnesota demonstrate, success is also the result of painstaking
selection of resources and application of pedagogical approaches. Are
you a language teacher? Yes, you are. But you are also a content
teacher, Talbot advises. You have to be smart about marrying those
two pieces.