“English language learners scored significantly lower than fluent speakers of English,

and it appears that changing the linguistic structure in math problems can influence

student performance,” Abedi and Lord (2001) concluded after looking into the role of

language in student test performance. The majority of participants chose the

linguistically altered test questions during interviews conducted prior to the training

session, stating, "It seems simpler; you get a good understanding of what they want you

to do." Students often struggled to correctly interpret the meanings of mathematical

terms and phrases, resulting in inaccurate background representations and incorrect

calculations. “Constructing a symbolic framework for real-world understanding is a

complicated task in solving contextual problems,” Yerushalmy (2006) wrote, “because

‘knowing' the actual phenomenon cannot be easily manifested in symbolic language,

even when one is familiar with the language.” Students who understand the concepts of

perimeter, location, distance, and other mathematical phrases problems concepts, for

example, are still likely to struggle with correctly expressing the relationships and

conditions within the algebra word problem in symbolic terms. During their formal

educational years, students devote a significant amount of time to learning to read

written non-mathematical text, but they devote very little time to learning to read

mathematical writing. One explanation may be that mathematical writing's intrinsic

symbolic meaning is foreign to the student as compared to non-mathematical

communication's written words. “Developing skill by solving real-world problems in

function-based algebra implies learning to switch freely between terms, expressions,

numbers, and symbols,” according to Yerushalmy (2006). Their findings indicated that

the two abilities were related, with "a clear association between all math word problem

forms and reading comprehension types" being discovered.