Middle School Immigrant Students Developing Mathematical Reasoning in Spanish and English

Abstract

Language is the means through which mathematics is learned and mathematical reasoning is developed and expressed. Students' development of mathematical knowledge is dependent upon their codevelopment of language competencies. This study sought to understand the intersection of language acquisition and mathematical reasoning in a multigrade, dual-language mathematics classroom. The focal research question was: In what ways do immigrant middle-school students use L1 and L2 to communicate and to reason mathematically? The students who participated were first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico. Data included (1) ethnographic field notes, (2), videotape and audiotape of small-group work, (3) interviews with the bilingual mathematics teacher, and (4) student work. Findings suggest that (1) nonroutine mathematical problem posing is useful for eliciting productive talk and encouraging reasoning; and (2) when given the opportunity, ELLs are likely to draw productively upon their linguistic resources in L1 and L2 to support high-level mathematical reasoning.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Dr. Matthew Ondrus, who is currently a faculty member in the mathematics department at Weber State University, for his contribution to the data collection and analysis.

This research project has been partly supported by an NSF grant to CEMELA (Center for Mathematics Education of Latinos/as), and by the 2007 Elva Knight Research Grant, awarded to Eliane Rubinstein-Ávila, International Reading Association.

Notes

Both authors have contributed equally to this manuscript.

A version of this paper was presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York.

¹ A nonroutine problem is one for which the teacher does not provide students any particular method for solving it and students have not learned a particular method previously. Thus, students are unable to depend upon a routine to move from problem to answer. The expectation is that the students will struggle to find a method, or methods, to solve the problem.