Abstract
Against the background of providing learning opportunities for meaningful mathematics for all students, the presented Design Research study had the goal of investigating how to support students facing language barriers while learning mathematics in phases of unmoderated group work. For this purpose, learning meaningful mathematics and demanding discourse practices are connected with quality interaction characteristics identified in research on productive group work. This theoretical consideration was implemented in a learning arrangement on similarity by means of four design principles for enhancing language in group work on meaningful mathematics. The empirical insights show to what extent the intended demanding discourse practices and quality interaction characteristics can be identified in different steps of knowledge construction, and to what extent they are supported by the design element ‘role cards’. Instead of calling for less unmoderated group work for students facing language barriers, the results of the study suggest that more research is needed to design scaffolds matching students’ needs, aside from whole-class discussions.
Highlights
Active participation in teacher-led whole-class discussions has been shown to be important for students’ learning of meaningful mathematics (Walshaw & Anthony 2008)
Many qualitative studies have shown that talking about meaningful mathematics in more advanced steps of knowledge construction is often connected to engaging in Demanding discourse practices (DDPs)
As this paper focuses on the language perspective of the larger project, a literature review on discourse practices and learning meaningful mathematics (Sect. 2.1) and supporting quality interaction in group work (Sect. 2.2) are presented, followed by the conceptual framework of the study (Sect. 2.3)
Summary
Active participation in teacher-led whole-class discussions has been shown to be important for students’ learning of meaningful mathematics (Walshaw & Anthony 2008) During these discussions, students engage in reporting on procedures, explaining meanings of concepts and operations, arguing about the validity of a claim, and describing patterns in a general way (Prediger et al 2019). That aim entailed a composition of tasks (with accompanying teacher manual) that simultaneously provide mathematics and academic language learning opportunities, and treat language as an explicit learning goal in mathematics classrooms This aim implied a need for further disentangling the language demands in group work, in order to design learning arrangements in such a way that they provide learning opportunities to all students.
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