Academic Archives of Yamaguchi Prefectural University Volume 18
published_at 2025-03-31
Japanese children naturally acquire many words in their daily lives, but foreign children do not have as many opportunities to do so, so it can be inferred that Japanese language ability affects problem solving in math problems.
First, we text-mined commercially available problem books and extracted frequently used words. Next, we examined the standard difficulty level of the JLPT and its use in textbooks, and found that more than 70% of the vocabulary commonly used in arithmetic sentence problems were familiar words used in daily life, and even those not commonly used in arithmetic were often used in other subjects.
In solving arithmetic sentence problems, not only some difficult words and words that are not frequently used in textbooks, but also the language environment can be a major hurdle for foreign children to learn, as they are required to have Japanese language skills in their daily lives.