Teacher's and students’ use of gestures and home-language during classroom-talk to elicit a shared understanding of structure in figural patterns: A case study in a multilingual mathematics classroom

Abstract

This study examines whether a teacher and his learners increase their use of gestures and home-language when they have different perspectives in noticing the structure of a pattern. Previous studies either focused on teachers’ or students’ use of gestures. This study, however, looks at both the teacher's and students’ adaptive use of gestures and home-language during classroom-talk. Ten sessions were video-and-audio-recoded and then transcribed. A mixed approach was adopted to analyze classroom-talk. One teacher and his twenty-four students in a multilingual grade seven classroom participated in this study. English was the instructional language and the participants were multilinguals with Lebanese colloquial Arabic as their native spoken. The findings show that the teacher and learners adaptively increased their use of home-language and gestures to foster common understanding of commonalities in figural patterns. The findings have implications for training teachers in multilingual classrooms to help them how to orchestrate classroom-talk effectively.