Welcome to the forum!
]]>Welcome to the forum!
]]>Math standard until university is pretty weak everywhere.
]]>Welcome to the forum. What country?
]]>Welcome to the forum!
]]>Welcome to the forum.
You might want to not use your email address as your username. This could be a security problem. Let me know if you want to change it and I will.
]]>I respectfully submit that your comparison ("That is sort of like knowing the difference between a predicate nominative and an object noun") is faulty, in that the goal of a language teacher is a student's ability to communicate, not their ability to name the parts of speech or diagram a sentence perfectly. Language teaching is nothing like the English classes we may have been subjected to in our grammar school years.
As for the SAT/GRE/GMAT discussion, the fact remains that applicants to degree programs must achieve certain scores on these tests in order to be considered for admission. Whether I agree with the test or the content or purpose of the test or how it was written/administered/interpreted is irrelevant to my purpose. In serving my students in an advisory capacity, I noticed that they were not doing as well on the math section as we would expect. These are NOT 17 year old high school kids. Some are professional educators with graduate degrees from universities in their home countries in accounting or engineering or math. Others are 20-22 year olds who have come to us to prepare for undergraduate studies. They are held to the same academic standards as any applicant to the university here, but they did not have the benefit of learning how we use language when "doing" math.
That said, here is a real-world example. I wrote a list of numbers on the board and told the students these are the scores from a recent exam. I asked them, "What is the mean of these scores?" After a pause, one student (who is a professor of statistics in her home country and is planning to pursue her PhD here), raised her hand and said, "It means 4 students got As, 8 students earned Bs, 7 students got Cs, and 5 students did not pass the exam."
Can you define "absolute value" by looking up "absolute" and "value" in a translator, even if you know what "absolute value" means in your native language? Search for "right triangle" in a translator and see if you get the geometric definition. If I told you the word for "parallelogram" in Thai, could you draw one? A language learner may know what "real," "rational," and "imaginary" mean in everyday (or, "real world," as you prefer to put it) English, but we know that they have very specific meanings in math, and knowing this meaning can make a huge difference when reading a math problem.
So my focus is to expose students to the many uses of math language (yes, including specific vocabulary!) that they might find on a standardized test.
I hope this clarifies my purpose. Thank you for any additional support/ideas you may have.
]]>Welcome to the forum!
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