Using a Translanguaging Lens to Analyze Students’ Meaning-Making in Mathematics

An epistemological shift toward heteroglossia in research on language diversity in mathematics classrooms transcends the dualities (e.g., home/new language; everyday/academic language) and hierarchies (e.g., valuing academic above everyday language or school over home language) that have traditionally shaped our understanding of language diversity and language learning. In this article, we propose translanguaging theory as a transformative framework for expanding our awareness of the complex and dynamic nature of emergent bilingual students’ mathematical meaning-making. Translanguaging theory shifts the focus from identifying the distinct resources that EB students use in their meaning-making (e.g., languages, gestures) to understanding how mathematical meaning emerges from the blending of the resources present in a particular learning activity. This blending of resources is a collective process that emerges, flows, and changes moment-by-moment as participants engage in meaning-making together. Using data from the DMELL project, we use translanguaging theory to analyze how two Spanish-English EB students in middle school in the US use their communicative repertoires and their interactions with each other, the facilitator, and the dynamic representational technology (DRT) to engage in the mathematical practice of modeling. Microethnography provided an analytic framework compatible with translanguaging theory to conduct a moment-by-moment analysis of how the mathematical activity unfolded. The results show how the students flexibly used their communicative repertoires and the affordances of the learning environment to construct their model of the problem situation and find a solution. Furthermore, they made sense of the problem situation collectively, building on each other’s ideas and the facilitator's suggestions, making stepwise progress toward creating their model. This analysis provided a holistic depiction of the students’ meaning-making, allowing us to recognize their modeling process without labeling any of their contributions as “less” than mathematical. Implications for how translanguaging theory may guide future research and practice on EB students’ mathematical learning are provided.