Multilingual preservice teachers evaluating mathematical argumentation: Realised and potential learning opportunities

Abstract

Preservice teachers’ evaluations on school students’ mathematical argumentation are rarely the focus of mathematics education research. Yet, understanding how they evaluate the quality of their future students’ mathematical argumentation is important. In this paper, a discussion by a group of multilingual preservice teachers is analysed to determine the properties they considered to be connected to high-quality mathematical argumentation. The preservice teachers, who had two different dominant languages, discussed whether examples of Grade Four students’ work, written in those two languages, displayed the qualities of being clearly written, mathematically correct and complete. From an analysis of this discussion, we identify how the preservice teachers’ multilingual backgrounds provided potential and realised learning opportunities about students’ mathematical argumentation.