CRI听力:British Primary Math Teaching Goes 'Shanghai Style'

As part of an on-going exchange project between the British Department for Education and the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, two groups of math teachers from Shanghai have been sent to Britain since last November. The Chinese approach of teaching mathematics is welcomed by local teachers and students, which they have come to describe as 'Shanghai-style'.

One of its key features is the use of precise, technical mathematics language even when teaching children as young as seven or eight.

Wang Chengjun is an experienced math teacher from Shanghai and has been teaching at the Wroxham School near London for two weeks. He says British math teaching methods tend to have a variety ways of expressing one mathematical operation. He founds British math teachers have at least 6 ways to express a single mathematical formula. Instead of providing a precise function, children in Britain simply need to express the meaning of the formula. It's quite different from in China.

"For example, when it comes to subtraction, you can use an expression like 'take away' to refer to a minus sign. You can say take 2 apples way from 5 apples. But you are required to write down 5 minus 2 equals to 3 when it comes to the exact formula. However, in Britain, you can choose minus, take away, reduce or deduct to express such an action. This kind of teaching approach might do little in helping children to establish a precise conceptual grasp of mathematics."

Sally Barker is a math teacher at Wroxham School who assists her Chinese colleagues in teaching and communicating with local teachers and students. She finds her students are enjoying the benefits of the Chinese teachers' way of encouraging them to seek out logical and precise solutions to mathematical problems by themselves.

"When they were creating the 10-times table by the children had worked which number lines to look that. You know, they all chosen different. And then as a class, they share their findings. And rather than say this is how you do your 10 times table—you've got your unit and you act your zero, it's like what you notice, and the children discover the pattern. SO it means more to them."

In addition to the teacher exchange, British publisher Harper Collins is said to be planning to publish a series of "Shanghai math" text books, to popularize the methods that have allowed math students in Shanghai to perform well in the annual Programme for International Student Assessment.

For CRI, I'm Duan Xuelian in London.