A Research On The Development Of Junior Middle School Student's Mathematics Language

Teaching mathematics from mathematics language perspective is one of contemporary mathematics teaching issues. To certain extent, mathematics teaching is the teaching of mathematics language. Although mathematics language is not the content of mathematics teaching, it is the medium of mathematics teaching. Thus, mathematics language is not only a teaching means but also one of teaching aims. The junior middle school level is an important and critical stage to develop students' understanding of mathematics language. To study the development of mathematics language of junior middle school students will benefit the design and the implementation of mathematics teaching. Questionnaire survey, classroom observation, and teaching cases analysis were adopted to investigate junior middle school students' development in mathematics language. In the present study, mathematics language includes oral language, written language, physical language, graphical and tabular language, and symbolic language. It reflects the interactions between process and product, concreteness and abstract, format and content, intuition and logical reasoning. The present study examined junior middle school students' attitude toward mathematics language and their strategies of using mathematics language to solve mathematical problems.Two conclusions were drawn from this study: (1) the junior middle school students had a very weak sense of using mathematics language to solve mathematical problems. They were lacking of the motivation and had little experience of using mathematics language to solve mathematics problems. They usually learned mathematics in an intuitive way, but not in a logical way. (2) the junior middle school students had poor strategies of using mathematics language to solve problems. Their ability to describe mathematical information and to transform among different representations of mathematics language was weak. Therefore, they had difficulties to monitor, adjust, implement and reflect their problem solving process which involved the use of mathematics language strategies.The result of the study shows that: (1) we should regard mathematics as a communicating tool in teaching mathematics at junior middle school level, (2) multiple representations of mathematics language should be used in mathematics teaching so as to improve students' understanding of mathematics language, (3) the development of students' mathematics language includes the process of intuitive experiencing and the process of logical thinking, (4) the development of junior middle school students' understanding of mathematics language seems to have the following phases: intuitive phase, oral and literal description, analytical phase, symbolical reasoning, mathematical explanation, integration of the learning object and its properties, and the relational phase.Based on this study, the following implications were made: in order to promote students' ability to represent mathematical information, mathematics teaching should provide students with multiple representations of mathematics langue, make use of the transformation between the concrete and the abstract, the special and the general, the essential and the formal, the intuitive and the logical, and be implemented in line with the development sequence of junior students' understanding of mathematical language.