Numeracy and Older Immigrants’ Health: Exploring the Role of Language

Conveying numerical information across language and cultural barriers presents unique challenges, which have not been well addressed in the literacy and numeracy literature to date. The primary language spoken prior to learning English may be an important factor in health numeracy for English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) immigrants. This is because languages differ in the number of numeric concepts such as whole numbers, probabilities, proportions or rates embedded in their structure. Some languages have more of these numeric concepts than others. Speakers of a language with fewer numeric concepts may be constrained in their numeracy skills and may have difficulties comprehending numeric information that contains numeric concepts that are absent in their primary language. Some languages, such as Kikuyu—a language spoken by the Agikuyu people of Kenya—lack concepts and words for some numerical forms, such as fractions and ratios. In contrast, Mandarin has many numeric concepts. In this chapter we consider how language may affect numeracy of older non-native speakers of English whose primary languages differ in the representations of numeric concepts.