• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.247-267
• /
• 2016

It has been pointed out that the mathematics textbooks according to 2009 revised national curriculum cause difficulty not by mathematical knowledge but concomitantly by words and sentences for the first graders who just started learning Korean alphabets. This study focused on the suitability of words and sentences in mathematics textbooks for elementary first grade. We analyzed the degree of difficulty and familiarity in terms of words and the structure, length, and expression in terms of sentences. The results show some causes that lead the first graders to the difficulty. In more detail, we found 108 difficult words and 6 unfamiliar words for the first graders. And it is noticed that the textbooks contain 37 compound sentences, 727 complex sentences, and 38 compound-complex sentences. They also contain 237 long sentences that are composed of 9 words or more, 168 sentences that assign two activities or more, and 52 sentences that contain three nouns or adjectives or more successively. Based on these results and discussions, we suggested several implications for writing mathematics textbooks for the lower grades in elementary school.