BilMath

Project description

Bilingual education, in which a subject, such as geography, history, or mathematics, is taught in a language other than the majority language (Swain & Lapkin, 2005), has been on the rise for years and is now widely embedded in many parts of European school systems (Pérez-Cañado, 2012). Nevertheless, there is a serious shortfall in the empirical foundation of this instructional design (Goris et al., 2019). In particular, potential challenges or risks receive almost no attention in the public discourse, although a growing body of evidence suggests that the promised simultaneous promotion of language skills and subject competencies through bilingual instruction (Dalton-Puffer, 2008) is by no means successful for all students. More and more studies show that especially the subject competencies in subjects taught in this form of content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL) are worse than those of students from monolingual instructional models (Lo & Lo, 2014) or that more time is needed to achieve the same competencies (Piesche et al., 2016).

One possible explanation for this decline in subject-specific competence in bilingual learning are the so-called "language-switching costs". These occur when learning takes place in one language, but retrieval or application of what is learned takes place in another language (Grabner et al., 2012; Hahn et al., 2019; Saalbach et al., 2013).

This effect is obvious in subjects with highly language-dependent information, such as history or philosophy (Marian & Fausey, 2006). In contrast, language switching costs in subjects where information is represented in a less language-dependent manner, such as mathematics, might be quite low. These subjects might thus be better suited for bilingual instruction.

However, it has also been shown in the field of mathematics that knowledge is represented in a language-dependent way (Gordon, 2004; Van Rinsveld et al., 2015). However, relevant studies have so far mostly been conducted in laboratory settings with artificial or under-complex material, which may not necessarily be representative of everyday school mathematics instruction. Moreover, the participants of previous studies were mostly bilingual university students, which again is not at all representative of learners in bilingual school programs.

Furthermore, there are numerous desiderata in the examination of language-switching costs in general and in mathematics in particular. For example, there are almost no results on individual moderating factors. Also, the cognitive processes underlying language switching costs are still not conclusively clarified, and the temporal persistence of language switching costs and thus their possible influence on the further learning process has not been investigated yet.

Therefore, in the BilMath project we want to address the following questions to gain a generally better picture of language switching costs in bilingual mathematics instruction and to use these findings to optimize already existing programs of bilingual mathematics instruction, if necessary:

 

1. Do language-switching costs occur when the material requires not only a reproduction of factual knowledge but also more complex types of knowledge such as procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge, or transfer?
2. Are language-switching costs persistent over time and to what extent do they influence further learning processes that need to build on the knowledge acquired with language-switching?
3. What are the individual factors that make some students more resistant or vulnerable to language-switching costs?
4. What are the cognitive processes underlying language switching costs?

Relevant publications

• Grabner, R. H., Saalbach, H., & Eckstein, D. (2012). Language-Switching Costs in Bilingual Mathematics Learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 6(3), 147–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2012.01150.x
• Hahn, C. G. K., Saalbach, H., & Grabner, R. H. (2019). Language-dependent knowledge acquisition: investigating bilingual arithmetic learning. Bilingualism, 22(1), 47–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728917000530.
• Saalbach, H., Eckstein, D., Andri, N., Hobi, R., & Grabner, R. H. (2013). When language of instruction and language of application differ: Cognitive costs of bilingual mathematics learning. Learning and Instruction, 26, 36-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.01.002
• Volmer, E., Grabner, R. H., & Saalbach, H. (2018). Sprachwechselkosten beim zweisprachigen Mathematiklernen: Transfereffekte und individuelle Unterschiede. Zeitschrift Fur Erziehungswissenschaft, 21(1), 71–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-017-0795-6
• Wußing, M., Grabner, R. H., Sommer, H., & Saalbach, H. (2023) Language-switching and retrieval-based learning: an unfavorable combination. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1198117.