Teacher professional development in the multilingual context - the quest for best practice in numeracy teaching in the early grades

• In Event: Highlighted Session: What do math teachers need to help their learners succeed? Research and insight on teacher professional development

Proposal

Research into the state of primary education in South Africa has indicated that a good number of learners fall behind by as much as two to three years below their actual grade by the time they are in Grade 6 (Spaull & Kotze, 2015). It is evident that cumulative growth in the knowledge gap starts in the early grades (see, for example, research by Fritz, Long, Herzog, Balzer, Ehlert & Henning, 2020). While the learning gaps cannot solely be attributed to one factor, they raise questions about the teacher's role in creating meaningful opportunities for adequate teaching and learning of numeracy in early grade classrooms in South Africa and the extent to which teachers teach for understanding in these grades. Research into teaching and learning in the early grades in South Africa has repeatedly shown a lack of coherence in the teaching of numeracy and a decline into choral responses (Venkat & Adler, 2012). There is also evidence of low levels of cognitive demand, little individualised teaching and learning and inadequate feedback and formative assessment, none of which are helpful in developing conceptual understanding in learners (Hoadley & Boyd, 2022). Several reasons have been put forward to explain this incoherence in teaching, and these learning gaps in the early grades, precipitated by knowledge gaps that teachers themselves demonstrate (Venkat & Spaull, 2015). A key factor has been the issue of language and the role it plays in the teaching and learning of numeracy, especially in the early grades. A number of factors make the matter more complex in South Africa. Two of these are: 1) South African classes are multilingual; 2) it is not uncommon for early grade teachers to be trained in English with the assumption that they will recontextualise what they have learnt in English into the indigenous language that they will use as medium of instruction when they teach. In a context that is deeply multilingual, these complexities present a number of challenges to both the teacher and the education system. This presentation will draw on the Bala Wande programme to exemplify how a teacher development initiative has begun to enculturate teachers to draw on students’ multilingual repertoire in the teaching and learning of mathematics in the early grades.

Author

• Ingrid Marta Sapire, School of Education, Wits University