Mapping talk about the mathematics register in a secondary mathematics teacher study group

The mathematics register refers to the forms of meaning and styles of communication used by the mathematics disciplinary community. Many mathematics education scholars have attended to this idea, yet it has gotten little attention in secondary mathematics teacher education. Work related to content-based literacy points to potential benefits for an increased focus on the mathematics register because an important role of teachers is to assist students in developing facility with the mathematics register in order to support students’ learning. This study examines the ways in which a group of secondary mathematics teachers talked about the mathematics register over the course of a year-long study group focused on mathematics classroom discourse. In particular, we analyze the study-group discourse to identify themes and shifts in the ways the teachers collectively made sense of the mathematics register. We found that they used two particular discourse practices to make sense of the mathematics register and that they came to discuss the mathematics register as more than specialized vocabulary.