Aims of Investigations into the Role of Language in the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics

Educators are now convinced of the important role language plays in school as far as teaching involving communication about knowledge. In fact, the teaching and the learning of mathematics require various language activities such as reading, listening, writing, and discussing. When learning mathematics in school, students are faced with written formulations by the textbook or by the teacher, with the oral discourse of the teacher in the classroom, and with the talk of their classmates. The content of these statements deals with a wide range of objects, ideas, and activities.

The functions of language in the context of mathematics classrooms are those that have been recognized for a long time in the development of thought: Language serves both as a means of representation and as a means of communication. As a consequence, its role in mathematics education cannot be neglected. Among the language issues inherent in attempting to teach and learn mathematics in school, we (as researchers in mathematics education) are concerned with those issues related to the fact that it is mathematics that is being taught and learned. The specific context of instruction and the specific teaching content jointly affect the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of the language used in mathematics teaching, which differs from the language of everyday life not only in its explicit aspects but also in its implicit aspects.