Language identities in students’ writings about group work in their mathematics classroom

Abstract

In this article, I explore language identities and processes of negotiation concerning parts of these identities as seen by a group of students from a bilingual mathematics classroom. A collection of 10 students' individual writings on the questions 'What language do you use during group work in your mathematics class and why?' is examined from a sociopolitical perspective. My data emphasize the importance of addressing the complexity of the identity work that goes on in the students' texts. Through their writings and despite the perception of limits, students negotiate complementary language identities that are contrary to the established monolingual ideologies in the research context. Students show distinct degrees of agency in their responses as they attempt to produce language identities that are much more complex than those politically ascribed to them.

Language Practices of Trilingual Undergraduate Students: Engaging One Task in Three Languages

“…They later translated them back into English to make the ideas compatible with the classroom language situation. Some bilingual mathematics students also switch between languages in order to express themselves easily and efficiently [18]. The switching is not necessarily the result of the students not knowing a word or a phrase in one language; rather, they are taken to facilitate the use of words or phrases in the other language.…”

“…In his verbal explanation during the two interviews, S13 switched to Kiswahili, saying "kwa hivyo, Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY the words seemed to have been taken to facilitate the use of words or phrases in the language. In my view, S13 used the words in order to express himself easily like bilingual students do [11], [18]. In fact, he had earlier on indicated that English is not "common" to him and it could be that he used the next official language as means to communicate with the researcher.…”

Language as resource: a key notion for understanding the complexity of mathematics learning

“…Such construction inevitably influences the options made available and produced in language. However, empirically driven evidence of learners drawing on and using their languages and meanings to learn mathematics in the immediateness of classroom situations in cultures of official language of instruction (e.g., Setati, 2005;Planas, 2011;Turner et al, 2013) substantiates the possibility of transforming the very conditions of recognition of meaning as it goes along. Overall, the realization of language as resource for the creation of mathematical meaning requires attention to the context of culture and to the immediate situation in which learners interact with the language of mathematics and the language of instruction.…”

“…The resource metaphor is particularly important in multilingual classrooms due to the numerous studies that continue to report that multilingual learners are somehow Blacking^in language. Throughout two decades of visiting Catalonian schools and mathematics lessons in low-income neighborhoods, I have experienced discourses of Blanguage learners^implying learners of the official language of instruction-not learners of language-produced in opposition to learners who speak Catalan at home (Planas, 2011(Planas, , 2014. The questions of who is a language learner in the multilingual mathematics classroom and for how long are certainly relevant.…”

Volume 13 Issue 7b Complete Issue

“…From a sociocultural perspective, student identity has proven a useful construct to capture participation patterns of underprivileged students with a special social status in mathematics classrooms, such as low-performing students (Lange, 2016), language learners, or multilingual students (e.g., Planas, 2011; for an overview on the identity construct, see Bishop, 2012).…”