Exploiting the epistemic role of multilingual resources in superdiverse mathematics classrooms: Design principles and insights into students’ learning processes

Abstract

Many language policy documents worldwide have called for treating students’ multiple languages as resources in subject matter classrooms (Beacco et al., 2015). Many qualitative observation studies (Adler, 2001; Barwell et al., 2016; Planas, 2018) and some quantitative intervention studies in mathematics education (Schüler-Meyer et al., 2019) have also shown that teaching approaches that activate students’ multilingual resources can be beneficial. However, most of these studies refer to classrooms with shared bilingualism, which means teachers and students share at least two languages. In contrast, Meyer et al. (2016) describe European schools as superdiverse language contexts in which more than five non-shared languages can be present in a classroom with only the language of instruction being shared. This is exemplified in the German-language context: In German schools, 30% of all students are multilingual, with most of them being secondto fourth-generation children of immigrant families. Typical classes in urban areas have five to seven languages, with only German being shared by all students and English learned as a foreign language. Teachers might speak one immigrant language, but not all. Usually, using home languages is allowed in small group work, but not encouraged and built upon. The prevalence of non-shared multilingualism raises the question of how teaching approaches for activating multilingual resources can be transferred from classrooms with shared bilingualism to superdiverse classrooms with nonshared multilingualism. In this paper, we argue that this transfer is possible when the focus is not only on the communicative role of multiple languages (i.e., so that students can