Abstract:
Samoan students have continued to join schools in New Zealand seeking quality tertiary education. These brave and ambitious young brains have left the comfort of their home island and decided to venture into new schools with new cultures and definitely a very different way of doing things. In the list of the differences that these students have found in New Zealand schools, the leading one has been the language of learning and examining. Back in the Island of Samoa, the predominant language of interaction, instruction and examinations had been Samoan. In New Zealand, all this changed as English is the preferred language of interaction, learning and examinations. This was thought to have a huge impact on the student’s ability to perform in these schools, especially for mathematics. This study investigates whether a Samoan student's fluency in language was directly connected to his/her performance in mathematics. Senior students, parents and teachers were asked to provide primary data. Examination results from NCEA of the previous year were also obtained as further information. Analysis of the data showed that Samoan language fluency had a positive correlation with the students’ mathematical performance, while their English achievement had a negative correlation. The explanation for this unexpected finding (the literature links greater English fluency with positive mathematics achievement) is that, for this group, English and Samoan fluency are both measures of the time spent in New Zealand. The conclusion, therefore, is that students’ mathematics achievement declines during their first years in New Zealand as they struggle with a new culture and language, even though their English may be improving over this time. Some suggestions and recommendations are given on how best to help these ELLs to learn better and perform excellently in New Zealand schools.