Beyond communication: using language for researching curriculum, pedagogy and policy in mathematics education

The language and other media used in educational practices do not simply transmit the ideas and intentions of speakers and writers. The practices themselves shape and are shaped by what is said. The texts produced by speakers and writers in a practice such as mathematics education thus draw on ways of construing the world that are legitimate within the practice and also constrain the ways in which listeners and readers may respond.Discourse analytic methods drawing on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics provide means of describing the world of mathematics education through analysis of its spoken and written texts. This allows us to address questions about the nature of mathematics and mathematical activity and about the nature of teaching and learning, of teachers and of students as these are produced in the texts of a given practice.This article is based on a plenary lecture presented at the Children’s Mathematical Education conference held in Poznań, Poland in July 2014. In it, I discuss a discourse analytic theoretical and methodological approach to researching mathematics education and illustrate this with examples drawn from investigations of curriculum and classroom practice.