The act of explaining can help students to develop new understandings of mathematical ideas, construct rules for solving problems, become aware of misunderstandings or a lack of understanding and develop their mathematical communication. Their explanations can also offer opportunities for a teacher to understand more fully what the students are…

This study begins by connecting semantic elaboration with conceptual understanding and syntactic elaboration with procedural understanding in the context of fractions. Through case studies and discourse analysis, the work and communication of students in fourth through sixth grade is analyzed to determine the extent of their semantic and syntactic…

This article offers a particular analytic method from systemic functional linguistics, "thematic analysis," which reveals the mathematical meaning potentials construed in discourse. Addressing concerns that discourse analysis is too often content-free, thematic analysis provides a way to represent semantic structures of mathematical content,…

Focuses on the language used by elementary mathematics teachers and its relationship to students' understanding of mathematical concepts, as well as their misconceptions. Describes eight situations in which the use of precise, formal mathematical terms could be replaced by informal language, particularly when introducing new concepts. (TW)

Provides examples and a discussion of the Inquiry Cooperation Model (ICM). The ICM is a way of describing a pattern of communicative cooperation between teacher and students. It tries to develop students' preconceptions into mathematical competence. Contains 15 references. (DDR)