Revoicing in a Multilingual Classroom

Abstract

The concept of revoicing has recently received a substantial amount of attention within the mathematics education community. One of the primary purposes of revoicing is to promote a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics by positioning students in relation to one another, thereby facilitating student debate and mathematical argumentation. Our study reexamines revoicing in a multilingual high school algebra classroom; our findings challenge the assumption that revoicing is necessarily tightly connected with classroom argumentation. We demonstrate that a single discursive form, such as revoicing, can play a wide range of valuable functions within the classroom. More importantly, we investigate systematic differences in the ways that revoicing is used, by a particular teacher, across languages. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Notes

¹Although attributed to Goffman, prior scholars in other disciplines had also been interested in similar phenomena such as Bakhtin's polyphony (1981) and Vygotsky's appropriation of other's voices (1978).