THE MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF LANGUAGE IN MATHEMATICS: THE CASE OF FIVE PROSPECTIVE LATINO/A TEACHERS

This paper reports a study of prospective bilingual teachers and the intersectionality of language and mathematics in a non-traditional field experience. Qualitative data were analyzed in order to map Spanish and English language practices to teachers ' assistance strategies. We define assistance strategies as those actions that are intended to help students understand content. Findings demonstrate the complexity of prospective teachers ' use of language in mathematics teaching and suggest implications for teacher preparation programs. Preparing teachers to become linguistically responsive educators has been a current issue in Teacher Education (Darling-Hammond, & Bransford, 2005). Most work relating to this issue has been done on monolingual prospective teachers, while there is very little work on bilingual prospective teachers, especially in the domain of mathematics. The purpose of this paper is to report a study designed with the intent to investigate how prospective teachers grapple with the intersectionality of mathematics learning and language through their participation in a non-traditional field experience. The participants were Latina/o prospective teachers who served as facilitators in Los Rayos de CEMELA, and after-school project