Andraspråkselever och det matematiska språket

The study included transcripts from seven students with Swedish as a second language in grade 3, with the purpose being focusing on how they experience language during mathematic lessons and how second language learners´ learning could be understood from a sociocultural perspective. Each student was individually interviewed. My method for interviewing the students was using a semi-structured way of interviewing, meaning that I had predefined questions with room for asking follow up-questions during the interviews. The students were asked questions about their background, and they also got to answer mathematical questions including mathematical terms and words. They were asked questions about what they found difficult and easy within the mathematical questions. The second language learners had in general low difficulty with the understanding of the mathematical language in the mathematical questions. The results show that the students have appropriated knowledge by scaffolding and the zone of proximal development, which is part of the sociocultural perspective of learning. A conclusion is that the students didn’t show any signs of having trouble understanding words within mathematics that usually causes confusion among second language learners. When it comes to further developing their language skills a support of pictures can be used to describe difficult words, further can physical material also be used while learning second language learners´ new mathematical terms and words. The physical material can also act in combination with pictures to easier explain new mathematical terms and words