Subtract? That’s a Math Word! Unpacking Teachers’ Language Choices in Preschool and Kindergarten Classrooms

Gabriela Arias de Sanchez 1 *
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1 University of Prince Edward Island, CANADA
* Corresponding Author
EUR J SCI MATH ED, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 366-379. https://doi.org/10.30935/scimath/11988
Published: 07 April 2022
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ABSTRACT

Even though a substantial body of research suggests that adults’ math talk fosters children’s mathematics development and willingness to learn mathematics, little is known about how teachers make pedagogical decisions to communicate mathematics to young students. Supported by socio-constructivist and semiotic lenses, the study focuses on the close interactions between teachers and their students to better understand the educators’ perspectives and the rationale for their mathematical pedagogies when communicating and mediating number sense to young students. An instrumental case study approach and discourse analysis were utilized to investigate how a cultural tool, mathematics, was communicated and mediated to preschool and kindergarten students. Findings indicated that participants focused on supporting young students’ meaning-making processes before teaching language form. This pedagogical choice resulted in educators creating a particular early year’s mathematical discourse grounded in the avoidance of nouns and in the use of terms that students knew, verbs, and terms that denoted actions.
Keywords: early years mathematics, semiosis, discourse analysis, language choices

CITATION

Arias de Sanchez, G. (2022). Subtract? That’s a Math Word! Unpacking Teachers’ Language Choices in Preschool and Kindergarten Classrooms. European Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 10(3), 366-379. https://doi.org/10.30935/scimath/11988

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