Study of and work on mathematics teacher talk in classroom teaching

Résumé 0

In classroom research on mathematics and language, analyses of teacher talk typically address features in this talk that make or do not make it productive with respect to the interactive communication of mathematical contents. These features are, nonetheless, much less often studied from the perspective of the explicit content-based communication of specialized mathematical meanings, and instead rather oriented to more general and equally important considerations regarding, for example, the kind of questions teachers ask their learners, or the kind of answers they provide to follow up learner contributions. In this conference paper, I take a mathematical-linguistic focus in order to present two verbal tools in language —i.e. naming and lexicalization— aimed at supporting content-based teaching of mathematics in school classrooms for the communication of specialized meanings related to the content at play. I argue that these verbal tools can be used to study content-based mathematics teaching, and particularly to conduct research-informed work on this teaching with groups of mathematics teachers in developmental settings.