A COMPARISON OF MATHEMATICS AND FIRST LANGUAGE SKILLS AS CONCURRENT PREDICTORS OF SECOND LANGUAGE SKILLS IN BOYS AND GIRLS: A TEST-BASED STUDY

Abstract

Language skills and mathematical skills make use of the same sub-skills, and the same areas in the brain for their processing and a comparable psychological development. Mathematics skills are also reported to strongly correlate with language skills, and to depend on language skills for their processing. Therefore, there might be a robust possibility that these skills would be contemporary predictors of one another and a strong correlation could be expected among them. To investigate this hypothesis, scores of around 11 years 100boys and 100 girls in the subjects of English, Urdu, and mathematics were collected. They (boys and girls) belonged to the rural suburbs of a district in the South Punjab, Pakistan. They secured these scores in the grade 5 examinations conducted under Punjab Education Commission (PEC). The data was analyzed by applying a Pearson’s correlation analysis, a hierarchical regression analysis, and later on, a factor analysis to find the relationship among the said skills. The statistical analyses revealed the presence of a strong correlation among second language (L2), first language (L1), and mathematical skills. Comparison with a previous study showed that this relationship was stronger in boys than girls.