The influence of the linguistic inhomogeneity of number in decoding geometric information: the perspective of primary and lower secondary school students

Abstract

The article presents a survey involving fourth and seventh grade students in the Canton of Ticino (Switzerland) and Italy. The work is part of the FNS project Italmatica. Understanding mathematics at school, between common language and specialised discourse, in which a corpus of textbooks for primary and lower secondary school was examined, focusing on the content “polygons”. One of the detected aspects concerns the widespread presence of linguistic inhomogeneities with respect to the indication of the grammatical category of number in the text parts dedicated to the presentation of the constituent elements of the polygon, often shown in relation to a figural representation. It was hypothesised that these inhomogeneities caused difficulties in pupils’ reception and processing of the text. The results of the survey show that the inhomogeneous linguistic choices in the use of singular and plural in the textbooks may lead readers to misinterpret the numerosity of the entities of a polygon, thus confirming that apparently minor linguistic features could have an impact in knowledge building.