Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’
Thursday 15th April 2010
Are Asian people somehow ‘naturally’ good at maths? 
There is a popularly held belief that Asian people are somehow ‘naturally’ good at maths. Malcolm Gladwell (the author of bestsellers ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’) argues very convincingly in his latest book that there is nothing ‘natural’ about the consistently high performance of students from Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan in international comparison tests; it relates, among other things, to their logical and transparent numbering systems.
Here is an interesting extract (‘Outliers’ p228 and 229):
‘...there is a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster that American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.’
The Numicon Approach highlights, and enables exploration of, the regular pattern in number for Western (and Asian!) children, that is somewhat hidden by the vagaries of the English language. Hopefully, over time, the Approach will come to lessen the sense of disenchantment with mathematics that is so prevalent among early learners who are put off by the fact that maths doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules are arbitrary and complicated. Instead, they can come to see that there is a pattern that they can work out, that there is an expectation that they can do it and that it is sensible...
The rest of ‘Outliers’ is good too – definitely recommend it!
