The epistemics of student problems: Explaining mathematics in a multi-lingual class

Teachers in dyadic explanation interactions in mathematics lessons tailor their explanations to problems they assume, rather than to problems the students formulate. In these interactions, the teacher rather than the student is established as having access to the problem, and as a result it is the teacher's problem that gets to be explained. This analysis adds to recent Conversation Analytical studies of how participants in interaction deal with issues of knowledge (e.g. Stivers et al., 2011a). It also shows a case of educational interaction in a multi-lingual context. The students have diverse linguistic backgrounds, and work-aloud interviews with them have shown that their problem often is not with mathematics, but with understanding the texts of the assignments. As a result of the teacher's epistemic authority these language problems never surface in the interactions. The teacher casts the student's problem invariably as a mathematics problem, not as a language problem.

► The mathematics teacher, not the student determines what the student's problem is. ► Students’ language problem with mathematics assignments are obscured. ► Interactional management of knowledge can construct the not-knower as knower.