Multilingual learners' opportunities for productive engagement in a bilingual German-Turkish teaching intervention on fractions

International audienceA teaching intervention should provide learners with opportunities for productive engagement with mathematics. Teaching learning situations are organized in patterned ways along culturally shared expectations of how these situations unfold. However, in multilingual classrooms, expectations of language learning can compete with mathematical expectations. Drawing on positioning theory, I will reconstruct these expectations-storylines-in a bilingual Turkish-German teaching intervention, specifically for the case of two learners, Akasya and Ilknur. I will show how the teacher establishes two expectations, one of "deciding who has downloaded more gigabyte" and one of "giving a Turkish explanation". After some effort on forming an explanation, Ilknur's and Akasya's shift their activities towards fulfilling the second expectation, which results in them being less agentic for the mathematics at hand. Instead, Ilknur and Akasya focus on the form of their explanation