Language use and participation in discourse in the mathematics classroom: When students write together at an online website

This article examines how students use language and participate in discourse during shared authoring of online texts in a mathematics classroom. The paper presents an intervention study conducted in an upper secondary classroom in Norway, where a wiki website was provided for the students to create mathematical explanations together. The students were organized in dyads. Considering the students' written products, work patterns, and ongoing speech and interaction between collaborating students, the use of language and participation in discourse in the classroom was genuinely altered by introducing the wiki. The wiki and the students' textbook were the main mediating resources used. A discursive space was demonstrated, where articulating and evaluating mathematical descriptions was realized through writing. When writing together, the students' articulatory processes and thinking became overt and socially shared between collaborating students. Here elaborations and deepening of arguments took place as the students' thinking and mathematical efforts became explicit. The results suggest that the wiki text authoring was experienced as a discourse having a different purpose-as opposed to what is regularly associated with teacher-led instructional schemes-and thus the discursive activities went beyond a merely transmissional discourse. Implications for mathematics teaching and learning are discussed.