Students' Speech and Gesture: A Communicative and Strategic Tool to Convey and Discuss Mathematical Concepts in a Bilingual Classroom

Students were grouped based on my intuition of their knowledge of mathematics and their English skills. Students were removed from the classroom and worked in dyads and were videotaped. I sought to explore two questions. First, how does gesture lead to better communication in problem solving contexts? Second, how does gesture help resolve difficulties by allowing students to construct representations? The results showed that students struggled with orientation, specifically with length and width, but were able to overcome these struggles by using their gesture to highlight or replace talk.

discussion was in English. Tharp and Gallimore (1988) ... mathematical
discussion. Insuring the learning of ELLs requires innovations in intensive,
engaging, and challenging learning activities that can increase student
achievement as well as ...