Center for Mathematics Education (CFME)

We know that it is important to attend to the disciplinary substance of children’s thinking in the classroom, however much of this work focuses on children’s verbal or written work in English, and less attention is focused on bilingual students’ multimodal translanguaging (García, 2017). Limiting our focus can exclude a wealth of children’s productive ideas, and this can be especially true for bilingual learners. Thus it is important to support attention to multimodal children’s thinking, including non-dominant linguistic resources, gesture and action. In this study we focus on understanding ways bilingual children express ideas, as they evoke the many linguistic and semiotic resources available to them, including their languages along with accompanying non-verbal expression, such as gesture and action. We will design and conduct student thinking interviews around mathematics tasks with bilingual Spanish-English children.