Abstract:

Mathematics education research has been witnessing a social turn where thinking and learning are explained in a way that they are socially constructed within the specific socio-cultural contexts. In line with these theories, mathematics education research has paid attention to communication and language as mediating thought constantly recreating the social phenomena which in turn produces new ways of knowing about self, society and the world. Coming to know or knowing in practice is viewed as a process distributed among all participants in a social practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991).In the present study, the focus is solely on a teacher's discourse among all participants of the mathematical classroom practice.The teacher was teaching to students (ages between 16-19) who are multilingual in a high school mostly populated by multilingual and multicultural representing different nationalities in Denmark where the language of education is English. His lessons with one of his classes were observed for 1 month continuously with video recordings and field notes. An interview is conducted after the period. The purpose of the project is to analyze how teacher participates in the activity of mathematical meaning making in the discursive practice of the mathematics classroom. Discursive practice is taken as means and ways of producing knowledge where actions and reactions of people are constituted by the discourse, and the discursive practice is constituted by their actions. (Foucault, 1970). Furthermore, from the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics perspectives, Mohan’s (1986) “Knowledge Framework” (KF) will be used to study and analyze teacher's participation into the social practice/activity of mathematical meaning making. KF is developed in order to be used as for integrating language and content teaching in the school contexts, where the language of instruction is learners’ second language. In keeping with Foucauldian view of discourse which reproduces knowledge as representing knowledge with different systems of representations, by using it's rules and practices the analysis will be at discursive level. Major premise of the SFL approach is that language is a resource for meaning; it provides tools to investigate and critique how language functions in this meaning making process (Halliday, 1994). It considers discourse in relation to its situation or the context so, meanings constructed by the participants can only be interpreted within the contexts in which interactions occurred(Mohan & Slater, 2005).The attention given to the analysis of discourse must always be related to its context-both local and broader level-is also shared in social semiotics gained increased attention in mathematics education recently (Morgan, 2006).

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