Language in mathematics education in Africa: chronicling recent growth and leadership in the field

Abstract This paper is a systematic review of literature on research in mathematics education in multilingual classrooms in Africa where, across most countries, the majority language is not the language of teaching and learning. The surveyed research outputs span from 2015 to 2024, and were sourced from mathematics education and general education journals in Africa, book chapters, and top international journals. We used Google Scholar and the African Journals Online (AJOL) platforms to search for publications. A total of 75 publications met our inclusion criteria. We use four orientations – to language, to knowledge, to mathematics teacher education, and to classroom teaching – (which emanated from a dual process of induction and deduction) to understand our corpus of literature. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of these research outputs show, among other findings, that the vast majority of the 75 papers, reflect a heteroglossic orientation to language, and thus a view that multiple languages in use - language plurality - matters in multilingual mathematics education. A second key finding is that a focus on the integration of language and content learning goals was far greater in school classroom contexts as compared with mathematics teacher education contexts. There is further evidence that reflects an orientation to knowledge growth – the epistemic - and concern with how languages in use support functional multilingualism.