Performance of students in formal logic and relationship with their language and social class
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22267/relatem.20133.65Keywords:
Logic, Language, Social Status, Rules of recognition and achievementAbstract
Mozambique is a multilingual and therefore multicultural society, with more than 40 native languages. All of them are Bantu languages, with the exception of Portuguese, the official language since the independence of Mozambique, and few of the few immigrants’ residents in the country.
According to the 2017 General Census, only about 47% of the population had Portuguese as their mother tongue (INE, 2019). The dominant languages at the place where the research was carried out are: Ci-Changana, Ci-Ronga and Ci-Tshwa, all of Tsonga origin and mutually understandable among speakers.
Although only about 26% of school-age children communicate in Portuguese, this is the language of instruction in Mozambique. This information is relevant because, in the Mozambican context, speaking the official language, gives the speaker a differentiated status in relation to the others, that is, whoever speaks this language, theoretically, has a higher social status.
The objectives of the research are (i) to explore the strategies preferred by the students, from different social and linguistic extracts, when solving problems about logic and (ii) to relate performance in solving a question of logic presented in the research and school success.
The research is qualitative, supported by the discursive approach to learning mathematics. Eight students from the 10th Class of a school located in the semi-rural environment participated in it. The participants with better school performance showed to have the rules of recognition of the context in allusion, that is, they solved the problem involving logical reasoning based on the propositions presented in the statement, and from the meanings constructed texts legitimately accepted for that context, while with low performance they were based on their daily experiences to produce their texts, which reveals a lack of recognition of the context of the problem.
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