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A closer look at bilingual students’ use of multimodality in the context of an area comparison problem from a large-scale assessment

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Abstract

In this article, we use multimodality to examine how bilingual students interact with an area task from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in task-based interviews. Using vignettes, we demonstrate how some of these students manipulate the concrete materials, and use gestures, as a primary form of structuring their explanations and making mathematical meaning. We use our results as a basis to challenge the possible deficit perspective of bilingual students’ mathematical knowledge in current assessment practices. Choosing tasks that afford multiple modes of engagement and recognizing multimodal explanations in assessment practices has the potential to move us towards a better understanding of what bilingual students know and can do mathematically.

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Notes

  1. These students are usually referred to as English language learners, which positions them as not knowing English. By using the term bilingual, we attempt to highlight their knowledge of two languages, though they are still gaining proficiency in English.

  2. Hutchins calls “an input space from which material structure is projected into a blend a ‘material anchor’ for the blend. The term material anchor is meant to emphasize the stabilizing role of material structure” (p. 1555).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments in previous versions of this manuscript. This work was partly funded by the National Science Foundation (grant no. ESI-0424983). The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Anthony Fernandes

  2. Tucson Unified School District, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Leslie H. Kahn

  3. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Marta Civil

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  1. Anthony Fernandes
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  2. Leslie H. Kahn
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Correspondence to Anthony Fernandes.

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Fernandes, A., Kahn, L.H. & Civil, M. A closer look at bilingual students’ use of multimodality in the context of an area comparison problem from a large-scale assessment. Educ Stud Math 95, 263–282 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-017-9748-5

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