Browsing by Subject "Monikielinen käsitteenoppiminen"

Aims. In Finland all pupils in preparatory education study mathematics. This study focuses on the multilingual process of concept formation and meaning making in the context of math-ematics classroom of newly arrived pupils. In addition of new language of introduction, they face the specific language of mathematics. Previous studies have shown the close connection between mathematics and language. Studying mathematics also requires language skills. The purpose of this study is to find out how and in what ways newly arrived pupils use multilingual concept learning in mathematics. The purpose is to analyze how pupils use their language resources in mathematical meaning making process. Methods. The study was carried out as part of the project Meeting in the middle at the Uni-versity of Helsinki. The study was a qualitative case study and the research material con-sisted of four videos recorded in the secondary school preparatory class. During the videos, the pupils did mathematical tasks in pairs. Four pupils were chosen as participants, and they worked in two pairs. One pair was speaking Arabic together, and the other one chose to speak English instead of Arabic. The pupils’ use of multilingual concept learning was ana-lyzed with discourse analytical microethnography. Results and conclusions. My study showed that pupils use their different languages abun-dantly during the mathematical verbal tasks. Use of multilingual content learning became ap-parent when pupils shifted between languages. They did this to create meanings or to solve the content of task. Shifts between languages were connected to the way pupils created meanings of concepts and tasks that were in Finnish. The pupils also discussed the seman-tics of the concepts and the interpretations of the tasks. Possibility to use all their languages gave pupils the space where they could use their languages the way they thought was use-ful. Results of this study gave new knowledge about multilingual content learning in mathe-matics, especially since this has not been studied extensively in Finland yet.