June 2025
Key Takeaways:
- Students can participate more deeply when they can think and talk in their home language as part of their reasoning process.
- Home-language use in math classrooms can serve as a tool for cognitive processing, enabling students to reason in the language they are most comfortable with before moving to English.
Classrooms in the United States serve an increasingly multilingual student population. Yet, the policy in most schools is to use only English as the medium of instruction. Although evidence suggests that student discussion is crucial to conceptual understanding in mathematics learning, multilingual students and English learners rarely engage in meaningful, academically oriented discussion throughout their school day.
A better understanding of the specific ways that students can leverage their home language skills as they encounter mathematical tasks in class, interpret their basic meaning, and then deeply engage in those tasks may inform both professional learning for teachers and policy change efforts.
LRDC Researchers Jesse Rubio, Christian Schunn, Sarah Castleman, and Institute for Learning Fellow (IFL) Brenda Robles investigated how students productively use their home language in the mathematics classroom, and, specifically, how students use the home language to cognitively process concepts deeply. The authors argue for instructional approaches and policy shifts that recognize home languages not merely as needing silent accommodations, such as providing worksheet translations, but as resources for cognitive work in mathematics learning through problem solving, collaboration, and discussion.
Read the full study here.
Rubio, J., Schunn, C.D., Castleman, S., & Robles, B. (2025). Home language use in mathematics classrooms supports processing, not just input-output work. Language and Education.
