Abstract
Mathematics classrooms around the world serve students who are learning the dominant language of instruction. These students’ forms of participation in mathematical activity have often been examined from deficit perspectives. Mathematics education research is in great need of counter-narratives to such prevailing deficit assumptions so that we can see how such learners productively use existing resources to engage in mathematics. In this chapter we examine potentially fruitful ways of framing identity and learning centered on student agency that can be brought to bear on the analysis of emergent multilinguals’ mathematical activity. We then illustrate the utility of agency-centered framings with vignettes of student interactions that focus on how emergent bilinguals used multiple linguistic resources in powerful ways. The vignettes are drawn from a variety of international mathematics classroom contexts and focus on students as creative users of linguistic resources in ways that serve a variety of functions during mathematical activity.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term “emergent” bilingual or multilingual to highlight that English learners are not only learning English but also becoming bilingual/multilingual along a continuum of different types of bilinguals (see Fig. 1 in Valdes, 2005).
- 2.
It is important to acknowledge that some students are learning not a second language but their third or nth language. For example, in some schools in the United States there are African and Haitian students who already speak two languages (French and a mother tongue) and are now learning mathematics in English, their third language. It is critical that these students be recognized in the literature, especially since they provide evidence that multilingual students have already demonstrated that they are capable of functioning effectively in more than one language and that some of the difficulties they encounter in school mathematics—taught in a new language of instruction they are yet to master—result not from deficient cognitive resources but from sociopolitical context of instructional practices.
- 3.
This is not the case for all languages. In some languages, the word teenager is related to the counting words for thirteen, fourteen, …, nineteen. In Swedish, teenager is tonåring and the counting words from 13 to 19 are tretton, fjorton, …, and nitton. This example works in English and Swedish (as well as in some other languages) but not, for example, in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or Korean.
- 4.
Note that In Swedish teen-ager is ton-åring, and ton is ton, as in the measuring unit. This works in Swedish but not in English or other languages.
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Langer-Osuna, J.M., Moschkovich, J., Norén, E., Powell, A.B., Vazquez, S. (2016). Student Agency and Counter-Narratives in Diverse Multilingual Mathematics Classrooms: Challenging Deficit Perspectives. In: Barwell, R., et al. Mathematics Education and Language Diversity. New ICMI Study Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14511-2_9
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