As my instructor talked about how hard it is to understand mathematics if students are not familiar with the language it is being taught in, I recalled my own experience of my first day in Grade 10 math class just after I immigrated to Canada. I didn’t know what SOH CAH TOA was since I learned it in different language even though I’ve already learned trigonometry in Korea before I came. I asked my classmates who were in the same ESL class with me what SOH CAH TOA was, and their answers were “I don’t know either.” I was embarrassed about the fact that the activities of that entire class were about solving problems using SOH CAH TOA. My classmates who didn’t understand what SOH CAH TOA stood for were doing homework from another class. I asked my teacher what SOH CAH TOA was, and he explained that it is a way of remembering how to compute the sine, cosine, and tangent of an angle, and that each acronym stood for something, like SOH being Sine equal Opposite over Hypotenuse. Even after realizing what SOH CAH TOA is, I felt that it was difficult because “Hypotenuse” was a new vocabulary to me. My math teacher realized that I was having trouble with English, not with Math. So, before he started his lessons, he drew a triangle, and he labelled it as opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse to visualize it, and he tried to simplify the questions with easier words when I encountered the word problems in class. Also, before the beginning of each lesson he made a worksheet full of terminologies we were going to learn with definitions, so I would have easier time in becoming familiar with those terminologies. He didn’t only focus on teaching mathematics, but he also helped me to learn English. Only now can I truly appreciate how what a considerable teacher he was in being encouraging and patient with me. It also goes to show that language can be a real barrier in teaching math, but that it can be overcome with the right effort and attitude in both the instructor and the student.
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