Characterization of Strategies to Support Both Language and Mathematics Learning

• In Event: Promoting Discourse in Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Researchers have documented a mathematics teacher tension in bilingual contexts: how much attention mathematics should receive, and how much attention language should receive. In this paper, I analyze video data of the instructional strategies that a teacher in a Spanish immersion US school, and a teacher in an English immersion school in Colombia enacted. I draw on research on teaching mathematics to bilingual learners, as well as on content-based language instruction. I suggest that strategies enactments lead to class episodes that foreground either mathematics or language. In some instances, however, enactments led to class episodes that simultaneously support both mathematics and language. Further exploration of these later strategies can lead to understanding how to support both mathematics and language learning.

Author

• Jose Martinez-Hinestroza, Michigan State University