Teaching talk moves to support the discussion of divisibility content in a trilingual classroom

Abstract

In this article, we present our study of teaching talk moves and translanguaging practices used to support the discussion of divisibility in a Catalan–Spanish–English trilingual classroom of a secondary school. We examined a sequence of eleven lessons with a focus on seven talk moves – Switching languages, Revoicing, Recapping, Adding on, Focusing, Funneling and Eliciting. Through this we were able to identify some teaching episodes in which the attention was given to discussing specific mathematical–linguistic challenges involved in the learning and understanding of divisibility content. We illustrate this finding using an episode around the least common multiple and how interconnected moves of Switching languages, Recapping, Eliciting, Funneling and Revoicing functioned to distinguish the mathematical meaning embedded in the lcm labelling, alongside the mathematical meaning intended for the individual word names, least, common and multiple, for the noun phrase and for the concept. We comment on more briefly a second episode around the parity concept for elaborating on the same finding. Our contribution adds to recent work on mathematical–linguistic challenges in the literature and does so with unique data from the under-researched context of the trilingual mathematics classroom