This paper illuminates challenges confronting teachers and students at the literacy/numeracy interface in contexts where students have not developed sufficient English language proficiency to be learning mathematics through English but, due to socio-politically and economically driven perceptions are being taught in English. We analyse transcript data of classroom talk in a South African grade 4 mathematics lesson on fractions. Together with interview data, the lesson data highlight some of the consequences students’ diminished access to their home language appear to have on their access to mathematical meaning-making

B Bernstein

B Cooper

B Nicolescu

Department of Basic Education

Elisa Calcagni

J Bruner

J Piaget

JH Bernstein

JR Martin

JV Wertsch

K Maton

KL O’Halloran

LS Vygotsky

M Graven

M Probyn

M Setati

MA Simon

MAK Halliday

Mellony Graven

MJ Schleppegrell

N Mercer

P Gibbons

P Pausigere

P Renshaw

R Hasan

R Jorgensen

S Eggins

S Lerman

Sally-Ann Robertson

SEB Pirie

U Hoadley

V Nomlomo

YS Lee

This paper proposes a transdisciplinary framework to allow for a multifocal exploration of classroom talk practices. It draws on data from a broader study of talk in South African Grade 4 mathematics classrooms where the language of teaching and learning (English) was the home language for neither the teachers nor their students. Lesson transcript data from one teacher’s lessons on fractions are used to demonstrate how working with three strands of conceptual insight from the disciplines of psychology, sociology and linguistics conduces to a potentially richer understanding of a teacher’s use of classroom talk in mediating her students’ mathematical understanding. By drawing on elements of Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology, we make visible in the lesson data the ways in which this teacher used the ‘everyday’ in trying to navigate her students’ towards more ‘scientific’ conceptualizations of unit fractions. By then taking up aspects of Bernstein’s sociological work, we articulate, and make visible, how societal circumstances impinge on students’ access to exploratory mathematical discourse needed for epistemological access to abstract and generalized mathematical concepts. Finally, through Halliday’s work on the power of particular linguistic registers for meaning-making, we highlight challenges in learning mathematics in and through a second language and reveal the constraints placed on students’ opportunity to maximally exploit the distinct forms of meaning contained within the mathematics register

Graven, Mellony

Robertson, Sally-Ann

South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS)

Using a transdisciplinary framework to examine mathematics classroom talk taking place in and through a second language

Crossref

Rhodes Repository (SEALS)