Portuguese immigrant children and mathematics education

This paper begins by presenting a general overview of minority groups in Portugal and their relationship with immigration and education. Data regarding school enrolment and dropout are explored. Next, it focuses on minority children’s language diversity, and on its effect on classrooms and mathematics teachers’ strategies to deal with linguistic issues. Finally, it shows how language is needed to reach the aims and to develop the ideas of the Portuguese mathematical curriculum, concluding that there is a need for coordination between school, classrooms and community activities to support the language acquisition of children. 1. The Portuguese scenario Until the 60’s Portugal was considered a country of emigration. Since the 70 ́s, and especially after decolonization, Portugal became a country of destination for immigrants. Combining people that come mostly from Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola and GuinéBissau, immigrant minorities in Portugal in 1999 reached a total of 190896 persons with resident permit visa (INE, 1998), and this is increased by an estimated 10000 to 40000 illegal people. The Portuguese society is, thus, a multi-ethic, multi-racial, multi-linguistic and multi-cultural society, and, as in other European countries, this scenario poses new problems related to the education of immigrant minorities children. Such cultural diversity is usually found in the Portuguese classrooms, mainly in the Lisbon area, where one of the heaviest concentrations of people of immigrant minorities is located (47%). In the school year of 97/98, the total children from minority background enrolled in Portuguese schools was 7,09 %. In the areas of heaviest concentration there are schools with more than 50% immigrant students, mainly from an African background. Linguistic diversity is also found in many schools, and most serve large groups of students for whom Portuguese is not the primary language spoken at home. 1 In fact, in the particular case of Portugal, as a result of the increasing number of immigrant children, the issue of language acquisition and development for these children is itself a new national problem in the educational field. It has been largely reported that minority students’ achievements in school are at the bottom of the ladder, especially in mathematics (Steen, 1990; Secada, 1995). In 1 In Portugal, twelve schools have more than 50% minority children enrolled, twenty six have between 50% and 25%, and forty-five have between 15% and 25% (Entreculturas Data Base). Thematic Group 10 EUROPEAN RESEARCH IN MATHEMATICS EDUCATION III D. Moreira 2 Portugal, although there is no data to show exactly what is happening, regarding mathematics, school achievement among minority groups has been always lower than the achievement of regular students taken overall. Although to fully understand school enrolment and dropout rates in each minority group and in each grade, it is necessary to contextualize the data by the flux of immigration, immigration policies and countries’ historic-political conditions,2 it already deserves considerable reflection. Since schooling is for all, a problem of fairness and equity is underlying this situation. It is necessary to pay attention to diversity and culture in connection with education and equity. Since to fully participate in the increasing complexity of our highly developed technological society, mathematics education is required for all, and mathematical achievement is far from being satisfactory, this area of education becomes an even more delicate situation. Moreover, considering that language and culture are strongly intertwined and that classrooms are already multicultural settings, the low Portuguese proficiency of immigrant children is a problem that needs to be addressed in the context of multicultural education. Speaking with teachers of mathematics, one becomes aware of both the heterogeneity of experiences related to minority children in their classrooms, and the different ways they meet the challenges raised by the low Portuguese proficiency of their students. Every scenario is possible, from situations where teachers have classes with more than 50% foreign students, sometimes with the majority belonging to only one minority group, sometimes belonging to different ones, to situations where there is only one language minority student in the class. Among all these possible scenarios, the specific situation of each student further increases the linguistic complexity of classrooms. For example, we may find classes with newly arrived children from East Europe and other parts of the world that do not speak a single word of Portuguese, classes composed of children who already speak a little Portuguese, and classes where children are bilingual. The effects of such linguistic diversity are also varied, both in the ways teachers deal with it, and in children’s mathematical achievement. Thus, there are Asiatic and eximmigrant students that, when they arrived in Portugal, did not speak Portuguese but succeeded in mathematics, and some of them are now among the best students in mathematics. There are also students who succeeded in their Portuguese language skills, but not in mathematics. To explain success in mathematical achievement, teachers refer mostly three reasons: i) because students have good mathematical skills that help them to smooth the school differences and their ignorance of Portuguese; ii) because some mathematics teachers knew the students' natural language and found a pedagogical interaction relying on both languages; iii) because when there are students more knowledgeable of Portuguese language in the classrooms that speak 2 For obvious reasons this analysis cannot be done in this paper. Thematic Group 10 EUROPEAN RESEARCH IN MATHEMATICS EDUCATION III D. Moreira 3 the language of the new arrivals they are put together, thus, students facilitate each other in the translation of mathematical content. It is also possible to find schools where teachers began to learn the native language of their students, (for example, Capeverdean Creole), to help, or to start additional classes to support them in the Portuguese language acquisition, thus creating, a school dynamic that includes the mathematics teachers in the planning of actions and activities to deal with the learning processes of minority children. Another issue related to mathematics education of minorities and referred to by teachers as having immediate effect in classrooms is the dissimilarity between the mathematical content and methodological approaches of the Portuguese curriculum and that of the curriculum of the children’s home countries. For example, repeated or omitted content may induce boredom or confusion in students. In regard to families' involvement in supporting children's new language acquisition in relation to school processes, behaviours are also diverse. There are mothers who dedicate themselves to teaching reading, writing and counting to their young children in their native language, and simultaneously support them in the learning of Portuguese, while they teach themselves Portuguese also. Other families rely on their children to represent them in the new language. Others simply give up and just struggle to survive. Note the families that are struggling to support the difficult school situation of their children, and, at the same time, are trying to help them to keep their native language. Their native language is the language which they use to communicate, and to express affect to the family left in their home country. In sum, there are schools where teachers and school boards, are already searching for solutions to the learning and teaching problems of their students who do not have Portuguese as their native language. This is considered an important task, where mathematics teachers are involved in searching for adequate actions to develop their classrooms. There are also schools where this kind of work has not yet been initiated. While the issue of language and low Portuguese proficiency is one of the features that mathematics teachers refer to as being the most difficult and challenging, there is not a national educational program committed to surmounting the Portuguese language acquisition of minority children.3 The responsibility for creating conditions to improve the school achievement with respect to the specific problems of a new language acquisition is left to school boards, teachers and families. 2. The literature on minority language education Since the 70 ́s, there has been a proliferation of studies aimed at highlighting the different kinds of relationships among language, culture and discourse in the learning and teaching of mathematics, and showing the importance of these factors. The 3 Some efforts are been taken by Entreculturas to create and lunch materials to support teachers training regarding the issue of language acquisition. Thematic Group 10 EUROPEAN RESEARCH IN MATHEMATICS EDUCATION III D. Moreira 4 literature of mathematics education has identified a diversified set of variables. For example, the cultural and social organization of the school system, including pedagogical processes, materials, and curriculum; the cultural and linguistic background of the student, and their relation to teaching styles; the language of the student which can cause interference's problems particularly in the linguistic dimension of classroom life; the students and their social attitudes towards mathematics; and teachers’ attitudes and training, all have been found to influence students’ mathematical performance. Research evidence is that limited language proficiency inhibits mathematical reasoning. The review of literature presented by Riley, Greeno & Heller (1983) regarding the different kinds of knowledge involved with problem-solving activities at the elementary level, pointed out that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of mathematical word problems were associated with diff