Understanding Multilingual Learners' Mathematical Experiences and Meaning Making in a Canadian Educational Setting

Abstract

This is an ethnographic study designed to form an in-depth description and understanding of multilingual learners’ mathematical experiences and meaning-making in a plurilingual educational setting. I assumed a sociocultural perspective that draws from Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development. A sociocultural perspective offers a promising epistemological conceptualization of children, their learning, and language development as mediated by social, cultural, and historical contexts. One grade 2/3 classroom with 18 students from Eritrea, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria participated in the study. The data included observations, video recordings of students working on mathematics activities, copies of students’ work, and interviews with students. The results of the study revealed the teacher’s pedagogical practices as a significant influence on students’ mathematical meaning-making and learning experiences, which in turn influenced students’ individual identities as mathematics learners in the grade 2/3 classroom. There were also institutional and sociopolitical aspects that influenced the teacher’s practices, and in turn, influenced students’ mathematics experiences. Hence, the influences on students’ learning of mathematics take the form or shape of a reciprocal formation where one influence is connected to and influences the other. The findings of the analysis also show that it was the students’ interactions with one another that were at the heart of their meaning making. Students’ interactions were significant to their meaning making as they were constantly learning from one another. Little meaning making would have happened without these interactions. These interactions encouraged students to develop a collection of resources to share their thinking and ideas through verbal, visual, and written mathematical communications. Hence, utilizing language to make meaning and to negotiate their mathematical understanding. Ultimately, the descriptions of multilingual learners’ mathematics experiences and meaning making may inform research and practices to support other multilingual learners’ experiences in mathematics education. This study also contributes to what is still a very limited body of literature on multilingual students’ mathematical experiences and meaning in a Canadian educational setting.