Language Is Used In English

Language plays a vital role in the teaching and learning process in all subjects. English, as the known international language, is the most common medium utilized in the school systems. According to the report of the British Council and University of Oxford’s department of education, English language is increasingly becoming the lingua franca of education institutions across the world – from primary schools to higher education. Materials such as books and journals are written in English, including Mathematics – as one of the core subject in education. Hence, Math terminologies and concept explanation in teaching-learning processes are not translated in the languages dominating a certain country. In Southeast Asia for example, according to Kosonen
However, it was found out that one of the dominant factors of the pupils’ poor performance in Math and science is the use of English language in instruction because students are not fluent in reading questions, expressing themselves and experiencing difficulty in comprehending texts (Yong Pak, 2009). This data is supported by the study conducted by Arocena & Popma (2009) in Basque country (considered as part of Spain) in which students have the difficulty understanding terminologies in Mathematics due to EMI (English as Medium of Instruction). According to their findings, students are poor in this course because English is not their primary language used outside school; furthermore, learners hardly speak, read, or write in English. Thus, they are proposing on the role of the mother tongue in addressing difficulties in
175 of these living languages are indigenous and 8 are not. As viewed by Nillas (2002), this diversity in language among different ethnic communities in the country could be one of the factors of poor performance of student with the 92% than the international mean. Nillas proposes the studies of Myers and Milne (1998) who investigated the effects of home and primary language on the Mathematics achievement of various groups of language minority students. Myers and Milne found out that there were significant differences between the Mathematics achievement of various languages groups and that of monolingual English students. “The results for the home language model showed that the bilingual groups had significantly higher achievement scores on at least one Mathematics test than the English monolinguals and the non-English monolinguals had significantly lower scores than the English monolinguals”. But in Nillas’ study, it was found out that during the assessment, students have high scores in test EMI than the use of Filipino. Her study debunked Myer and Milne’s