Analysing pre-service teachers’ multimodal and Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Teaching of calculation strategies

Abstract

Background: South African pre-service teachers (PSTs) mostly learn to teach mathematics in English, yet are expected to teach learners bilingually, including their mother tongue, considering the introduction of Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education (MTBBE). Pre-service teachers must develop their teaching in ways that enable learners’ access to meaning using communicative resources such as multimodal and bilingual teaching.
Aim: To provide a methodological contribution to how researchers might analyse multimodal bilingual teaching practices to support teachers’ reflection on their communicative practices in mathematics teaching.
Setting: This study took place with intermediate-phase (Grade 4–6) PSTs in their mathematics methodology course at a higher education institution in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
Methods: In this qualitative formative intervention, we purposively sampled one representative PST’s micro-teaching bilingual video and one English demonstration video to show the emergent coding system that was iteratively refined for in-depth analysis.
Results: A useful coding system is revealed, enabling analysis and reflection on how the PST enacted multimodal bilingual teaching of the Jump Strategy. In this case, the PST enacted most of the multimodal elements from the baseline video and fluidly moved between isiXhosa, English, and loanwords to support learner access to meaning-making.
Conclusion: The coding system allowed for in-depth analysis of the PST’s video to better understand the nature of multimodal and bilingual teaching.
Contribution: The methodological contribution suggests an analytic coding system to explore the nature of multimodal bilingual teaching. This system, we argue, could be used effectively to support PSTs’ reflection on their multimodal and bilingual repertoires when teaching mathematics (especially important in the context of MTBBE).