Equity and the Quality of the Language Used in Mathematics Education

Mathematics Education and Language Diversity

“…Achievement is measured in relation to standards, and the profi ciency levels of different ethnic, linguistic, or socioeconomic groups, or of different countries internationally, are seen in terms of achievement gaps. Individual students, schools, language minority groups, other disadvantaged groups, states, and countries are seen as ahead or falling behind in terms of scores on testing instruments that are developed and analyzed from a perspective of "reducing the gaps" (Schütte & Kaiser, 2011 ). It is important to note that the "gap-gazing effects", as Gutiérrez and Dixon-Román ( 2011 ) call it, embed in themselves important discursive effects that go beyond the limits of the good intentions of evidencing the problems of low achievers and tend to confi ne the students, their families, their languages, and their learning to a locked, unmovable position.…”

“…Language is not just a conduit of communication; embedded within it are the ways of thinking and values of people. For example, Schütte and Kaiser ( 2011 ) note that almost one-third of the students in German schools have a "migration background" and are provided support to improve their linguistic abilities in the German language. Looking closely at a selected classroom episode on teaching of LCM (Lowest Common Multiple), these authors illustrate the challenges for the learners who are expected to negotiate the implicit rules of the formal linguistic register or that of school mathematics concepts.…”

Towards a Bernsteinian language of description for mathematics classroom discourse

“…As Schütte and Kaiser (2011) show, teachers' communicational means often do not match the institution's privileging of decontextualised language. When we investigate the classification of communicational means in mathematics classroom discourse, we need to go further than just locating the means within a (quantifiable) continuum.…”