The Affective Being of Multilingual Children’s Language Use for Mathematics Learning

Abstract

This article investigates how young multilingual children's mathematics learning is connected to their language use, lived experiences, contexts, and emotions. To this end, we consider the experiences of children who used both Spanish and English to learn mathematics. We center on two instances of kindergarten children counting and use Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as our theoretical framework to reflect on how words become meaningful in multiple ways as a result of context, particularly when used in more than one language. From this perspective, we pose that children's language use is affective and made meaningful through social relationships. We consider how the understandings of multilayered meanings uncovered using an SFL lens affords a substantial path to interpret and think about the language use of multilingual children during mathematics learning. We argue that careful attention to and interpretation of children's language can help counteract pervasive ideas of neutrality in education.