Pedagogic discourse and equity in mathematics: When teachers’ talk matters

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the role and nature of pedagogic discourse. We argue that teachers' talk plays a much more important role in students' learning than is often considered--particularly in the learning of racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students. We present one teacher who has a record of assisting her fifth grade Latino students to make significant academic gains in mathematics, and we examine the way she uses her talk in teaching and how students in her class develop control over the mathematics discourse. To help make our point, we contrast this teacher with another teacher whose instructional talk is not as mathematically rich.

Using what matters to students in bilingual mathematics problems

“…Giving students these problems served to transform the traditional classroom tasks that they regularly receive and, perhaps more importantly, the relationship between good problems and good problem solvers. Therefore I argue that the view of culturally and linguistically diverse students as not so good at problem solving has more to do with the kinds of problems and the kind of instruction they receive in school than with their mathematical proficiency (see Brenner, 1998b;Khisty & Chval, 2002;Khisty, 1995;and Moschkovich, 1999, for discussions about best instructional practices with these students).…”

Mathematics teaching practices with technology that support conceptual understanding for Latino/a students

“…For example, Moschkovich (2002) illustrates how bilingual students drew upon multiple resources, including their first language, multiple semiotic tools, and metaphors from everyday talk to create an argument comparing the slope of two linear functions. In a similar vein, Khisty and Chval (2002) showed how a successful teacher in a linguistically diverse fifth grade classroom engaged her students in high levels of mathematical reasoning by using a mixture of everyday and academic language as well as challenging problems that required the students to talk through complicated calculations. These studies and others (e.g., Brenner, 1994) show how discussions can be a very useful tool for developing mathematical understanding among linguistically diverse groups of students.…”

“…For this paper we focus on how three teachers set up and taught the same lesson to meet the needs of their students. In light of this focus, we build on the work of mathematics education researchers who have examined classroom discourse and lesson structure, with an emphasis on work that has examined the mathematics learning of linguistically diverse students (Brenner, 1994;Khisty, 1995;Khisty & Chval, 2002;Moschkovich, 1999). From these researchers, we focus on how the teachers created opportunities for linguistically diverse students to engage in mathematical reasoning, and provided (or restricted) access to conceptually focused mathematics.…”

See the world through my eyes: Looking into how we can improve provision for gifted visual-spatial learners in our classrooms.

“…Also important is being explicit about meanings of maths vocabulary thereby avoiding implicit assumptions about shared understanding of the terms that are used in verbal explanations (Alton-Lee, 2003;Christensen, 2004;Khisty & Chval, 2002;Sullivan, Mousley & Zevenbergen, 2003;Walkerdine, 1988).…”