Why we should teach Math in chinese to all students

The current debate on the language of medium to use to for teaching science and math is completely of ZERO value.  If the Minister and his cohorts were really interested in “EDUCATION” they would be looking at making multiple languages compulsory for all students.  We as a multilingual, multi cultural nation should embrace that diversity to strengthen the nation and not seek reclusive, exclusionary policies based on political prejudices.

Research clearly shows that young kids have no preconception of language and have an immense ability to grasp any number of languages (evidence here).  Likewise there is a clear correlation between mastery of multiple languages and IQ.  So why are we not capitalizing on it?

With regards to teaching of science and math, I just want to focus on Math as I don’t have the evidence for science yet. Have you wondered why there is a perception that “Chinese” are somewhat much better at math as compared to the rest of the world?  Well what the research shows, and lucky for the rest of the world, the chinese are better at math, not because they have a special math gene but due to the way math is expressed in chinese. Cantonese speaking countries  have the highest proficiency in math simple because of the way math is expressed in the language.

As an example – in english or malay – we say eleven / sebelas – which congnitvely make zero sense based on a number structure that starts with one and ends with ten. But in the chinese languages , 11 is said as ten one,  twelve is ten two. Now, you tell me which is easier for the brain the process – eleven  plus twelve or ten one plus ten two? Because of the superiority of the linguistic interpretation of numbers – math is simply easier to learn in Chinese then in Malay or in English. 

For more on this read the following:

 

Why Asian students do better in math

It may not be simply that they study harder (though anecdotal evidencesuggests they do). In this week’s New Yorker, Jim Holt profiles Stanislas Dehaene, a young French neuroscientist investigating how our brains handle numbers. According to Deheane’s research, we think about numbers in three distinct ways, each of which developed at a different point in human evolution.

The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

This last way of thinking about numbers poses problems for English-speakers:

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19, and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.” French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (“four twenty ten nine”) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

The lesson? Skip the STEM bills and pass instead the Mastering Asian Tongues at Home (MATH) Act. Then watch the Asian Advantage disappear.

It is such a shame that instead of leveraging on the strength of our diversity , we are stuck in truly stinking thinking as a result of our misplaced priorities. 

 

It is time we wake from our 50 year coma and start to think beyond race…

 

Here is another read on the matter:

 

Why Asian children are better at maths

Extract from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, ‘Outliers’

• Malcolm Gladwell
•  Sunday 16 November 2008
• Article history

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorising that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50 per cent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorise whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers – 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 – right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book The Number Sense. As Dehaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ’si’ and 7 ‘qi’). Their English equivalents – ‘four,’ ‘ seven’ – are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. For numbers above 20, we put the ‘decade’ first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15, and most don’t reach 40 until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it’s five-tens-nine.

‘The Asian system is transparent,’ says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. ‘I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.’

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don’t feel nearly that same bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their heads and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their languages corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is – and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more, they try a little harder and take more math classes, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have a built-in advantage. But it’s an unusual kind of advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan – and the children of recent immigrants who are from those countries – have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of innate Asian proclivity for math. The psychologist Richard Lynn has even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory to explain why Asians have higher IQs. That’s how we think about math. We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different – that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture. Here we have a legacy that turns out to be perfectly suited for 21st-century tasks, and it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our 21st-century intellectual tasks.