Exploring Multilingual Children's Conversations With Peers About Equal-Sharing Fraction Problems

• In Event: Supporting Students' Math Learning

Abstract

While peer conversations have the potential to contribute to student learning, especially among young children and multilingual learners, they remain rare in most classrooms. In addition to the management challenges that ensue when students are invited to interact, the conversations themselves are cognitively and linguistically demanding especially when students are talking about ideas that are new. We explored the conversations that occurred between pairs of multilingual elementary students when they shared their mathematical strategies with each other. Using Cobb’s (1995) sociological constructs we examined exemplary conversations between peers to better understand how multilingual students handled the linguistic and cognitive demands of sharing their own strategies, attending to the details of their partners’ thinking and providing feedback as needed.

Authors

• Rachel M. Restani, University of California - Davis

• Rebecca Ambrose, University of California - Davis

• Suzanne Abdelrahim, University of California - Davis

• Margarita Jimenez-Silva, University of California - Davis

• Tony Albano, University of California - Davis

• Robin Martin, University of California, Davis