Chapter 5: Right to Learn Mathematics: From Language as Right to Language as Mathematically Relevant Resource

Today, the richness of languages, cultures, and communities produces a complex heterogeneous picture of what it means to teach, learn, and think school mathematics. This picture is one of the reasons for terms like superdiversity entering classroom research in mathematics education (Barwell, 2016) to describe the plethora of intersecting types of diversity in the midst of discourses of uniformity and homogeneity. Despite the evidence of superdiversity in our world, pedagogies based on the belief that monolingualism is achievable and preferable are strongly rooted in history and tradition. In mathematics teaching and learning in particular, multilingualism is still considered exceptional and monolingualism remains the norm. In order to contribute to the body of works that challenge the monolingual norm, in this chapter we address two questions: What is the role of language in the mathematics classroom? What is the role of the languages of the learners? Central to our argument is the understanding of the language of the mathematics classroom as conformed by all the languages in the classroom and their uses.