Teaching Mathematics to English Learners

Recently, teachers in the United States are encountering an influx of multilingual immigrant students. The linguistic diversity can be challenging for teachers who need to think about how to foster language and disciplinary knowledge awareness in meaningful ways. Multimodal instruction (i.e., use of gesture, drawing, and movement) can serve to support conceptual understanding of emergent bilingual students in disciplinary areas such as mathematics or science. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the interplay between gestures and mathematical concepts. This study takes place in a ninth grade ESOL Coordinate Algebra Classroom. Using systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis, the researchers analyze the teacher's gestures through a corpus of three video recorded lessons. The results show that the teacher's gestures endowed with meanings and mathematical concepts can enhance students' understandings. These findings can contribute to recent research on multimodal pedagogic practices among teachers with multilingual and multicultural students.