Teaching Strategies, Methods, and Scaffolds Recommended by Mathematics Standards: Are They Reflective of Best Practices in Multilingual Pedagogy?

Decades of research on multilingual pedagogies has led to a compilation of best practices for teaching multilingual learners. For this reason, I conducted a content analysis of the “Strategies and Methods” section of Georgia’s K-12 Mathematics Standards – 2021, as well as the accompanying support document entitled Scaffolding Instruction for English Learners, to see whether these documents reflect current research and theory to support multilingual learners’ mathematics language use and development. Teachers have these documents to plan and execute mathematics instruction for their diverse classes. Specifically, I determined and coded to what extent design principles from Zwiers et al. (2017) and Erath et al. (2021) for promoting mathematics language use and development were reflected in these documents. Before I began this research, I expected to find that teachers who depend on the strategies, methods, and scaffolds recommended by the standards’ documents would be left lacking the resources they need for teaching multilingual learners. Indeed, the study showed that teachers need to search elsewhere to find consistency and relevance in the teacher practices that support multilingual learners’ language use and development in mathematics. This study found that discourse level scaffolds are not prioritized in the mathematics standards or supplemental resource. The supplement document focused on academic vocabulary rather than engaging in higher levels of thinking and reasoning. Little to no attention is given to the importance of home language use in mathematics instruction. The study finds that teachers are encouraged to facilitate student talk, but no examples are given of strategies or plans to teach disciplinary conversational mathematics literacy. This study has implications for teacher training and professional development in mathematics pedagogy, and for educational policy. The research contributes to an understanding of best practices for enhancing language for learning mathematics.