Session Information
24 SES 11, Multiple Approaches to the Analysis of Social Interactions and Language Use in Asian and Western Mathematics Classrooms
Symposium
Contribution
Mathematics learning can be conceptualised in terms of the participation in forms of social practice, where discourses form key components of that practice. Language plays a central role in mediating and constituting this participation, which is performed as classroom discourse. Adopting this perspective promotes mathematical discourse from the role of a mere instructional means to that of the object of learning. Classroom discourse is a form of social performance undertaken within affordances and constraints that can be both cultural and linguistic. Traditionally regarded as only auxiliary to thinking, active mathematical communication is nevertheless believed to enhance mathematical learning. It is a useful exercise, however, to conceptualize mathematics as a special form of communication. Indeed, from this perspective, the term learning mathematics becomes tantamount to developing mathematical discourse.
The four papers in this symposium employ different analytical approaches to the study of social interactions and language use in Asian and Western mathematics classrooms. Comparison across such culturally-disparate sites poses powerful questions regarding forms of language use in the mathematics classroom and also with regard to similarities and differences in the nature of social interaction in differently situated classrooms.
The multiple sites of the sixteen-country Learner’s Perspective Study (LPS) provide a complex database through which to interrogate and extend existing theories of learning and instruction. Data generation conforms to a common research design focused on sequences of at least ten lessons at each site, documented using three video cameras, and supplemented by the reconstructive accounts of classroom participants obtained in post-lesson video-stimulated interviews (Clarke, 2006). This provides a formidable database to support a variety of analytical approaches.
Since three video records were generated for each lesson (teacher camera, student camera, and whole class camera), it was possible to transcribe three different types of oral interactions: (i) whole class interactions, involving utterances for which the audience was all or most of the class, including the teacher; (ii) teacher-student interactions, involving utterances exchanged between the teacher and any student or student group, not intended to be audible to the whole class; and (iii) student-student interactions, involving utterances between students, not intended to be audible to the whole class. All three types of oral interactions were transcribed, although type (iii) interactions could only be documented for the selected focus students in each lesson. Where necessary, all transcripts were then translated into English.
This symposium combines a focus on classroom patterns of participation (social organization and specific classroom practices such as questioning) with fine-grained analyses of associated patterns of language use. Each paper sees mathematics learning in terms of the participation in forms of social practice. Language plays a central role in mediating this participation and the nature of language use in mathematics classrooms provides a key indicator of pedagogical principles underlying classroom practice and the theories of learning on which these principles are implicitly founded.
Reference
Clarke, D.J. (2006). The LPS research design. In D. J. Clarke, C. Keitel & Y. Shimizu (Eds.), Mathematics Classrooms in Twelve Countries: The Insider’s Perspective. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 15-37.
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