Research project LÄSMA – Learning and Academic Language in Mathematics

During the transition from primary to middle school, the demands and expectations on reading comprehension in mathematics change. Students move from primarily developing their ability to decode text to using reading as a tool for understanding and learning other subjects. At the same time, mathematical texts become more complex, requiring students to be able to interpret, reason about, and use the language of mathematics. For many students, this transition is challenging, as they need to develop both mathematical concepts and a more specialized mathematics language in order to understand and learn mathematics.

The project LÄSMA – Learning and Academic Language in Mathematics investigates how mathematics teaching can be designed to support students in this development. The focus is on how teaching can use linguistic resources to help students interpret and reason about mathematical texts, develop their understanding of mathematical content, and at the same time build their mathematical academic language.

The new knowledge generated by the project can be used by teachers, school developers, and teacher education programmes to develop more language-responsive mathematics teaching. As a concrete outcome, the project will develop a research-informed lesson sequence that focuses on the relationship between mathematical content and mathematical language during the transition from primary to middle school.

The Study

The study is conducted within a design research model in which researchers, mathematics developers, language developers, and teachers collaboratively identify teaching challenges and develop instructional approaches. Teachers play a central role in defining the problem and co-designing the teaching intervention. The project is carried out in collaboration with one Grade 3 teacher and one Grade 4 teacher. The data used in the study consists of the mathematics texts currently used in classroom instruction.

The analysis is based on theories of mathematical discourse (commognition) and theories of language as a resource for meaning-making (Systemic Functional Linguistics, SFL) to understand how the development of mathematical academic language is connected to students’ learning in mathematics.