In the theoretical part of the master's thesis, reading literacy, its role and importance in today's educational system are stressed. Reading literacy was also connected to the subject of mathematics and we searched for their common points. In the process, we present the connections between the language and mathematics, and the ways how to stimulate the development of vocabulary in pupils, and thus its use within mathematics. We also made an overview of concepts and symbols which are introduced to the pupils at the primary level at the planar geometry. Furthermore, we mention the development of the geometric concepts by the two theorists, Piaget and van Hiele. We present their models and search for differences among them. In the empirical part of the master’s thesis, we were interested in how successful pupils are in the use of mathematical terminology, mathematical symbolic notation, and the symbols in the planar geometry. We were mostly interested in words or language which is used in the description of certain geometrical concepts and forming definitions. The pattern of our research was the pupils of the fourth grade of two town elementary schools. Together, we thus included five classes of the fourth-graders. By the examination which we composed, we checked the use of some basic terms of the planar geometry (a point, a line segment, a line, and a ray). Among others, we were also interested in knowing the terms in connection with the circle and the circumference (a center, a radius, and a diameter) and the terms parallelism, perpendicularity, and symmetry. The uses of symbolic notation and the symbols were checked with the appropriate mark of lines (a line segment, a line, and a ray), notation of mutual position of lines, notation of compliant line segments, and the notation of length and the sums of lengths of the segment lines.
The results of the research showed that most pupils recognize and appropriately name the basic geometrical concepts and mark them with a symbol appropriately. The difficulties begin to emerge in the description of geometrical concepts in form of a few-sentential notation and in the notation of the difference between geometrical concepts where words are in the forefront again. This can tell us that pupils are still not used to the use of language i.e. the use of words in mathematics, by which they could present certain concepts. They present the concepts by drawing the picture more easily, while they are still pretty modest in the use of the appropriate terms and technical words. As we mentioned van Hiele and the levels of geometric thinking, we can say that pupils included in our pattern are on the descriptive level, as predicted by the model. However, we believe in spite of that that the knowledge of the pupils is not yet perfect and that in the following years some deeper understanding will have to be acquired in certain geometrical concepts.
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