A Critical Reanalysis of Research on Students’ Identity in Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Science and Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Research on students who are culturally and linguistically diverse has found an achievement gap between them and mainstream students within mathematics and science, leading to research on how to improve their teaching and learning. Three main perspectives emerge within the literature, each focusing on and prioritizing some aspects of the teaching and learning of students who are culturally and linguistically diverse.

This thesis argues that research that falls mostly under one of the three perspectives – the discontinuity, continuity and sociopolitical perspectives - takes a relatively narrow lens of analysis, which leads to important points being missed. Gee’s discourse framework is presented as a possible unifying framework for the three dominant perspectives in the literature.

Discourse analysis is used to do a critical reanalysis of 10 articles that fall mainly under one of the three perspectives, focusing mainly on the students’ identities as mathematics and science learners. The results show that the discourse perspective is not only a unifying framework, but also a more useful one to study the identities of students who are culturally and linguistically diverse within the mathematics and science classroom.