I am a Lebanese guy who recently graduated from Yale University in the US and I have been teaching 4th and 5th grade (8ème et 7ème) math in a public school (متوسطة الأشرفية الرسمية المختلطة) in Beirut, Lebanon since October this year. If I write more posts on teaching and my experience, you'll be able to find them on this blog with the label [Teaching].
This problem is widely documented when it comes to the education system in the Arab World, but here goes (I'll ask the education guru Nafez Dakkak for some citations here): we either use written Arabic or a foreign language (French in my case, English in other schools/countries) to teach math and science.
In both cases, the kids are learning complex, oftentimes abstract material in a language that's not their first language. Think of a language you don't know or barely know, and imagine learning even the most basic math concepts in it. Now imagine learning these concepts for the first time in that language. I'm learning Spanish, and I tried to read a Wikipedia article on "los números primos." Ouch, right?
The math curriculum used in my school (and throughout public schools in Lebanon) is in French, and the kids I teach unfortunately have a very poor French: just to give you an idea, I spent 4 periods trying to teach my 4th grade students the words "combien" (how many), chacun ("each"), "il y a" ("there is/are") so I could give them a simple problem ("There are 5 bags; each bag has 3 pieces of candy. How many pieces of candy are there?"). I felt like it was too complex; they got bored and stopped paying attention no matter how hard I tried, and I realized I was trying to do too many things at the same time.
Most of the time, I resort to just teaching in Arabic, although French (along with spoken Arabic) is my first language. Although I think I am better at French than the non-French teachers around me, other teachers use more French than I do! This is simply because these teachers know what French the kids speak, so they know when to use Arabic and when to use French. They intuitively know that the kids will understand a word like "excellent" or "lève-toi" ("get up") or "regarde devant toi" but not something like "réveille-toi" or I don't know - I mean my whole point is that I don't know what they know!
This makes me terrified of using French. They're already expending so much energy learning the concepts, I don't wanna spend more of their mental energy on language skills that they're supposed to be getting in French class! That said, although I'm making it easier to learn the skills I want them to learn in the short run (like enumerating the multiples of 3), I'm limiting their capacity for more abstract thinking (like understanding why if Rami is carrying pieces of candy in bags of 3, then the number of pieces of candy he has is a multiple of 3): abstract thinking requires tying more technical terms and concepts to more mundane/everyday terms and concepts and is difficult to do across languages. By doing most of my teaching in Arabic, I am also not doing enough work to help them actually get what is asked from them without having to translate it word by word.
My better French is due to my growing up in a different setting that is more privileged, where even the kids spoke French (really the language of power if we don't take into account how the rise of English and the decline of France in general is making things much more complicated) amongst themselves. In most cases, this has been an advantage, but here it's actually preventing me from doing my work better because I'm further from the kids' linguistic sphere. I think that going forward, I want to try to speak French in class and really push my students to express when they don't understand what I'm saying, maybe I'll learn a bit of their French and they'll learn a bit of mine :)
With respect to the broader problem of language discrepancy, I'm starting to think that maybe we should teach math and science in spoken Arabic (عامية\دارج), like literally have our books written in spoken Arabic. Although it might be painful to (1) translate the technical terms and (2) teach the kids how to read standard Arabic (there are ways of writing it out there!), it's the easiest way for the kids to learn because they'll be able to tie math to their daily lives more easily (and they learn so much faster when this happens!!). The only issue is that, for those who get to university, they'll have to relearn math and science in another language (thanks for this insight Ilana!), which might be very hard because I suspect they will be worse at that language unless we find a way to reform our language curricula and teaching methods.
This problem is widely documented when it comes to the education system in the Arab World, but here goes (I'll ask the education guru Nafez Dakkak for some citations here): we either use written Arabic or a foreign language (French in my case, English in other schools/countries) to teach math and science.
In both cases, the kids are learning complex, oftentimes abstract material in a language that's not their first language. Think of a language you don't know or barely know, and imagine learning even the most basic math concepts in it. Now imagine learning these concepts for the first time in that language. I'm learning Spanish, and I tried to read a Wikipedia article on "los números primos." Ouch, right?
The math curriculum used in my school (and throughout public schools in Lebanon) is in French, and the kids I teach unfortunately have a very poor French: just to give you an idea, I spent 4 periods trying to teach my 4th grade students the words "combien" (how many), chacun ("each"), "il y a" ("there is/are") so I could give them a simple problem ("There are 5 bags; each bag has 3 pieces of candy. How many pieces of candy are there?"). I felt like it was too complex; they got bored and stopped paying attention no matter how hard I tried, and I realized I was trying to do too many things at the same time.
Most of the time, I resort to just teaching in Arabic, although French (along with spoken Arabic) is my first language. Although I think I am better at French than the non-French teachers around me, other teachers use more French than I do! This is simply because these teachers know what French the kids speak, so they know when to use Arabic and when to use French. They intuitively know that the kids will understand a word like "excellent" or "lève-toi" ("get up") or "regarde devant toi" but not something like "réveille-toi" or I don't know - I mean my whole point is that I don't know what they know!
This makes me terrified of using French. They're already expending so much energy learning the concepts, I don't wanna spend more of their mental energy on language skills that they're supposed to be getting in French class! That said, although I'm making it easier to learn the skills I want them to learn in the short run (like enumerating the multiples of 3), I'm limiting their capacity for more abstract thinking (like understanding why if Rami is carrying pieces of candy in bags of 3, then the number of pieces of candy he has is a multiple of 3): abstract thinking requires tying more technical terms and concepts to more mundane/everyday terms and concepts and is difficult to do across languages. By doing most of my teaching in Arabic, I am also not doing enough work to help them actually get what is asked from them without having to translate it word by word.
My better French is due to my growing up in a different setting that is more privileged, where even the kids spoke French (really the language of power if we don't take into account how the rise of English and the decline of France in general is making things much more complicated) amongst themselves. In most cases, this has been an advantage, but here it's actually preventing me from doing my work better because I'm further from the kids' linguistic sphere. I think that going forward, I want to try to speak French in class and really push my students to express when they don't understand what I'm saying, maybe I'll learn a bit of their French and they'll learn a bit of mine :)
With respect to the broader problem of language discrepancy, I'm starting to think that maybe we should teach math and science in spoken Arabic (عامية\دارج), like literally have our books written in spoken Arabic. Although it might be painful to (1) translate the technical terms and (2) teach the kids how to read standard Arabic (there are ways of writing it out there!), it's the easiest way for the kids to learn because they'll be able to tie math to their daily lives more easily (and they learn so much faster when this happens!!). The only issue is that, for those who get to university, they'll have to relearn math and science in another language (thanks for this insight Ilana!), which might be very hard because I suspect they will be worse at that language unless we find a way to reform our language curricula and teaching methods.
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