Have you ever found yourself losing your patience or temper when coaching your child with Maths word problems or story problems?
You may find that your child has no difficulty with actually adding or subtracting numbers, but they are not interpreting the word problem correctly and not adding the right numbers, or adding when they should subtract etc.
In other words, the difficulty is with understanding the language for Mathematics.
Our speech and language centre is one of the first to recognize that children who are struggling with Maths may require a program to specifically address the language skills involved in Mathematics.
During the recent December school holidays, we conducted our ever popular ‘Language for Maths’ program again to help children with language impairments tackle language for Maths. These children include those with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), SLI (Specific Language Impairment) and language delay.
If you have a child who may be struggling with the language for Maths, here are the top 3 tips to address common pitfalls or blind-spots children typically exhibit:
- The top teaching tip may be to remember that if your child is already struggling with language – don’t use too much language to explain the concepts!
While you and I may use words here to discuss how to explain concepts etc, when you are actually working with your child always make sure you use other forms of communication such as pictures, blocks, bar models etc. A good test would be to ask yourself,”If I were teaching a Russian/Japanese/etc child who speaks minimal English, would he get this?”
Encourage your child to do the same and not be afraid to put pencil to paper and translate the words into the form of pictures, or even use props to help them visualise the events in a Maths word problem.
5 replies to "Top 3 Tips To Address Language Difficulties In Maths Word Problems"
Great one. These tips and suggestion will help to improve maths languages easily.
nice
Nice suggestion. Thanks!
Visualization is an effective tool. Children are more likely to understand what is drawn than what is said and incorporating these tools into math teaching is a very clever idea.
I have a son who find it very difficult to cope with mathematical problems exactly like the ones you have explained about. I have talked to his teachers and found that he is excellent at arts and languages. I hope your tips will help him to improve his maths ability.
Hi,
Thank you for your comments. Hope the above is helpful for your son.
If there are other areas we could help, we will be happy to provide relevant tips 🙂