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I teach quite a few foreign students at a U.S. university. Frequently students are placed in our most remedial math class due to not having placement scores and failing to test out of the course. I am trying to put together a list of resources for how our terminology compares to what they are used to. For example, I know many parts of the world use a comma as a decimal separator where the U.S. uses a decimal point. Other languages don't group things into groups of 1s, 10s, 100's of various units then such as 5 things and Latin America to U.S.

Does anyone know of any such resources already made? If not, other suggestions for how other countries do and represent things differently in primary/secondary mathematics would be helpful for me to put together my own tutorial for incoming students.

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    $\begingroup$ I suggest that this may not be as helpful as you think it is. You'll have students from 100 different cultures; so any particular translation tip will only be helpful for 1% of them. E.g., Last week for the first time I discovered I had a student who couldn't read Arabic digits b/c they'd been brought up with Eastern Arabic numerals instead (!). But laying that all out in a document would just confuse other students. It's better to spot-check trouble areas and help them on an as-needed basis. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel R. Collins
    Apr 15, 2022 at 2:33
  • $\begingroup$ And then there are different ways for notating long division, for example. $\endgroup$
    – Rusty Core
    Apr 16, 2022 at 7:15

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