Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Computing in Multilingual Contexts

Abstract

Background and Context We refer to multilingual learners1 as students who are learning more than one language and whose home language is different from the country’s dominant language(s) (e.g., English in the United States). As of 2020, approximately 56% of the world population spoke more than one language. In fact, 13% of the world population speaks three languages fluidly (Moungin, 2020). Speaking more than one language is an expectation and a need in the everyday activities of most people in this world. However, displacement and colonization are some of the factors that have required populations such as refugees to learn new languages. According to McAuliffe and Khadria (2020), the global refugee population was 25.9 million in 2018. Of this number, 52% were under 18 years of age, suggesting that a large proportion of them were school-age children. Approximately 6.7 million refugees left Syria, and 3.7 million of them were hosted in Turkey. In the United States, there are about 4.5 million multilingual students, and more than three fourths of this student population speak Spanish as their first language (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). In fact, the United States hosts the second largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, after Mexico (Thompson, 2021).