Abstract The concepts of area and perimeter are problematic to primary and secondary school learners. They often confuse their meaning; often evidenced in assessment tasks by learners misusing the formulae of one for the other. In this research, translanguaging is used as a pedagogical resource to teach these concepts. The study was undertaken on a sample of two Grade 6 classes from two rural Zimbabwean schools. A quasi-experimental research design was used in which there were two experimental and two control groups. The results of the study show that there is a marked difference in performance for learners who used translanguaging over those who used the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) only. Learners developed a strong mathematics register for the concepts of area and perimeter. The errors and misconceptions in the treatment groups were considerably reduced compared to the control groups. The study suggests that translanguaging is beneficial to teaching area and perimeter in particular and overcoming learners’ mathematical misconceptions in general.

中文翻译：

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跨语言教学在农村学校周边和地区六年级主题教学中的作用

摘要面积和周长的概念对于中小学生来说是个难题。他们经常混淆自己的意思。学习者经常在评估任务中证明他们将一个公式误用于另一个公式。在这项研究中，翻译被用作教学资源来教授这些概念。这项研究是对来自津巴布韦两所农村学校的两个6年级班级的样本进行的。使用准实验研究设计，其中有两个实验组和两个对照组。研究结果表明，与仅使用学与教语言（LoLT）的学生相比，使用跨语言学习的学生的表现有明显差异。学习者为面积和周长概念开发了强大的数学寄存器。与对照组相比，治疗组的错误和误解明显减少。研究表明，跨语言翻译特别有利于教学领域和周边环境，并总体上克服了学习者的数学误解。