The impact of changing the language medium for mathematics subject on rural secondary school students: a case study in Kelantan / Neo Kian Sen, Moniza Abdullah and Jusoh Yacob

This research studies the impact of the changing of language medium on secondary school mathematics learning among the Malay rural students in Kelantan. We focus on the analysis of mathematics performance attained by two groups of pupils. The first group of students was invited to attend a researcher-made Standard Mathematics Achievement Test (SMAT) prepared in English and the second group of students was invited to sit for the same test which was translated in Bahasa Malaysia. The test has contained 30 multiple-choice questions based on school mathematics curriculum for Form One till the early term of Form Three. It was conducted in eight schools in Kelantan from May 2005 through June 2005. Restricted by time constraints, we selected the Form 4 students to be our sample of second group· and the Form Three students to be our sample of first group. The first group of students had learned mathematics in English since they entered secondary school, whereas the second group of students had learned mathematics in Bahasa Malaysia since primary school. To our research subjects, Bahasa Malaysia is their mother tongue and English is a second language to them. The data analysis related to the achievement test includes: (a) item analysis of students performance on individual multiple-choice questions; (b) multiple comparison of the over all performance on the SMA T between the two groups and between sexes within the same group; (c) association of variables between performance of the SMAT and academic performance in school for selected subjects. The questions on the SMAT show a satisfactory reliability with Cronbach value of .861 for the script prepared in English; and . 773 for the script prepared in Bahasa Malaysia. Our findings on difference in performance accomplished by the two groups of students on the mathematical standard achievement test provide evidence that, when compared with students who learned mathematics through their mother tongue, students who learned mathematics in second language experienced particular difficulties in mastering mathematical terminology and developing cognitive skills and conceptual understanding of mathematics subject matter. The findings of a positive correlation between the performance of the mathematical achievement test and the results of mathematics attained by the students in school has shown indirectly that the instrument we used to measure the students performance in mathematics is to some degree suitable. Besides this, the finding of positive correlation between the performance of the mathematical achievement test and the result of the language medium subject implies that low proficiency of the language medium could be a likely cause of the lower mathematics achievement attained by the students.