Lucky Numbers

by Marie Hofmannová and Jarmila Novotná

Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

INTRODUCTION

The following unit is a part of LOSSTT-IN-MATH project piloted in the CLIL course (Content and Language Integrated Learning, i.e. teaching a non-language subject through the medium of foreign language) at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague (Novotná, Hofmannová, 2000). This two-semester pre-service teacher training course is aimed at students as of the third year of their studies. It is a seminar, 90 minutes per week, with many activities run in the form of workshop. The course is led by two trainers, one specialised in mathematics education, the other in methodology of teaching English. During the LOSSTT-IN-MATH piloting experiments, the CLIL course was attended by fifteen trainees. The course was originally designed for teacher training of prospective teachers of mathematics and English language. It is conducted in English. Regardless of this fact, also students – prospective teachers of other non-language subjects and foreign languages participate. This feature enriches the course in the multilingual perspective. The course combines educational theory and teaching practice, bringing students gradually from lesson observation, mastering subject specific vocabulary and CLIL specific knowledge and skills. This is followed by microteaching of peers based on a variety of materials (e.g. textbooks, student-made worksheets) and concluded by a teaching module in real school conditions. Mathematical content covers mathematics for lower and upper secondary levels and reflects both mathematics taught in public system of education in the Czech Republic as well as some aspects of the bilingual experiment carried out in selected upper secondary schools. From the language perspective, the aim of implementing CLIL is to provide pupils with more exposure. What CLIL offers to learners of any age, is a natural situation for language development which builds on other forms of learning. For the purposes of piloting LOSSTT-IN-MATH proposals, we selected such units that seemed to be compatible with our course content. The activity Lucky Numbers was included in the set of investigative activities proposed by Western Australian Mathematical Association and later modified to combine mathematics and foreign language teaching.

Main Piloting

by Marie Hofmannová and Jarmila Novotná

Second piloting

by Jaroslava Brincková, Iveta Dzúriková and Pavel Klenovčan
Pedagogical Faculty, Matej Bel University, Banská Bystrica, Slovak Republic

Third piloting (at the University of Parma, Italy)

by Lucia Doretti
Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, University of Siena, Italy

Conclusion

by Marie Hofmannová and Jarmila Novotná