Abstract
As English-only efforts continue in the US schooling system, dual-language programs have served as attempts to preserve students’ home language. An after-school, dual-language, Spanish–English, mathematics program, Los Rayos was developed in a predominantly Mexican/Mexican–American neighborhood in Chicago. As participant observers with a sociocultural perspective, we explored the linguistic and personal resources used by participating 4th grade bilingual Latina/o students. We found that students used imaginative, playful, and hybrid linguistic resources to make sense of and solve probability tasks when engaged within a zone of mathematical practice. Results challenge narrow perspectives on bilingual students’ linguistic resources. Language implications are discussed.
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Acknowledgments
We thank all students and facilitators we worked with during this time. We learned important lessons with them. We also thank Dr. Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis for her valuable feedback on this manuscript. Finally, we acknowledge that the data used in this article were originally collected in an after-school research project conducted by Dr. Lena Licón Khisty, Principal Investigator, University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) as part of the Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinos (CEMELA), University of Arizona. CEMELA is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant ESI-0424983. The views expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency.
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Lead editors: Alejandro Gallard Martínez and Rene Antrop González.
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LópezLeiva, C.A., Torres, Z. & Khisty, L.L. Acknowledging Spanish and English resources during mathematical reasoning. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 8, 919–934 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-013-9518-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-013-9518-3