3 APMC 19 (2) 2014 Many young children may fnd it difcult to solve mathematical word problems even if they are capable of carrying out the necessary opera- tions required by the problem. It is common even for children whose frst language is English to be impeded by the linguistic demands of a problem (Perso, 2009). Children who can untan- gle the linguistic complexity of a problem may still fail if they cannot apply their mathematical knowledge to the problem situation. In this article, we propose a new approach to scafold- ing mathematical word problems in a way that makes them appropriate to a child’s stage of language acquisition. To investigate the sources of children’s difcul- ties, Newman (1977; refned by White, 2005) proposed individual structured interviews that consist of fve stages or prompts: • Read the question to me. • What is the question asking you to do? • What method will you use to fnd your answer? • Show me how to get your answer, and tell me what you are thinking as you do it. • Write down your answer. While the Newman interview has been used extensively across many countries for a long time (e.g., Clements & Ellerton, 1992; White, 2009), In this article Debbie Verzosa and Joanne Mulligan suggest a new approach to addressing the difficulties that NESB students encounter when solving word problems. Debbie Verzosa Ateneo de Manilla University Te Phillipines <dverzosa@ateneo.edu.au> Joanne Mulligan Macquarie University <joanne.mulligan@mq.edu.au> its use is limited if a child is in the early stages of learning English. Tis is the case for many chil- dren in Australia, such as Indigenous children in remote communities or recent immigrant children who have yet to experience schooling in English. Children learning a second language may be expected to go through fve stages of language acquisition (Krashen & Terell, 1983; see Table 1), so it is crucial to give questions or prompts that are appropriate for their stage (Hill & Björk, 2008). It is easy to see that the Newman prompts do not pose any problems for a child in the intermediate fuency or advanced fuency stages described here. However, these same prompts may not give useful information when a child is still in the frst three stages of language acquisition. A new approach We propose a set of prompts that provide more opportunities for children in the frst three stages of language acquisition to engage in mathemati- cal word problems and rich challenging tasks. Without such prompts, these tasks are often inaccessible due to these children’s language dif- culties. Our approach was drawn from our work with second-grade Filipino children who learn Word Problem Solving Prompts to support NESB students Using