Multi-language responsive teaching not only establishes classrooms where language diversity is appreciated and valued, but also is a starting point for supporting students’ understanding of mathematics. Multilanguage-responsive teaching has many benefits, such as positive identities or richer classroom communication. Moreover, since students navigate their world in multiple languages, using multiple languages in class helps them relate mathematics to their daily lives.

In the ML2-project, we developed learning activities that take students’ other languages as a starting point to create rich learning opportunities! Our tasks have students investigate how different languages to express mathematics as a way of enriching the mathematical concepts.

As mathematics teachers, we can exploit our students’ many languages for deepening their understanding of important concepts. We developed a pedagogical approach which supports students to share ideas in multiple languages in a way that all students can benefit, regardless of their language backgrounds. This pedagogical approach is practical for everyday teaching.

This film shows the central principle of comparing languages to unfold nuances in meanings for mathematical concepts. By breaking down words or phrases from other languages, different nuances of mathematical concepts can emerge. This creates opportunities for students to explain these nuances and their ideas about them, which is a basis to create learning opportunities from the students’ ideas.

Here you can read more about this central principle, and the role of language awareness for implementing this principle. With these guidelines, you can learn how to adapt tasks in line with this principle.