Beyond Keywords: Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics to Unpack the Language of Additive Word Problems

The learning of mathematics poses specific linguistic challenges. Amongst them, teachers and students need to be able to unpack the language used in mathematics word problems to understand its context, discern the relationships between the known and unknown information, and identify relevant solution strategies. Prior research has described some of the linguistic complexities within the math discipline. However, research has not yet examined the linguistic patterns of additive problem types in particular, nor explored how linguistic analysis might be applied to support prospective elementary teachers in making sense of these problems. Using a corpus of 400 word problems, the authors conducted an ideation analysis, drawing from Systemic Functional Linguistics theory. The findings resulted in a distillation of language features key to conveying the mathematical meanings in the three types of additive problems (i.e., change, part-part-whole, and additive comparison). Prospective elementary teachers were introduced to linguistic functional metalanguage as a tool for analyzing the key language features in additive word problems. Analysis of their work demonstrated their ability to employ the functional metalanguage to identify challenges and describe specific linguistic characteristics associated with each type of additive problem.