Mathematical agency and its connection to students' multilingual resources

Résumé En

By exercising agency, multilingual students are said to be able to direct the classroom discourse in ways that are conductive to their learning needs. It has been proposed that this is connected to the use of multilingual resources. In this study, a bilingual Turkish-German teaching intervention is investigated in regard to the question, whether exercising agency is connected to a specific use of Turkish or German or mixed. It employs positioning theory, assuming that exercising agency requires students to take positions from where they can articulate their problems/their learning needs. 176 instances of agency were identified in sessions two and four in 4 groups of the intervention (~720 minutes of video). Comparing the use of language in these instances with the distribution of languages in the intervention, there is no indication that exercising agency is specifically connected to the use of Turkish or mixed. Implications of this result are discussed.