ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the possible challenges and/or affordances of common language, cultural, and domain-related factors students encounter when reading mathematics word problems. This chapter describes a qualitative study using cognitive interviews with think-aloud methods to examine how middle school students with varying domain and English proficiency levels solved four word problems manipulated for linguistic complexity. The chapter presents students’ perceptions of the linguistic manipulation and how they used (or did not use) the problems’ language, technical vocabulary, context, and visual representations when solving them. Implications for teaching reading of word problems based on the results conclude the chapter.]
