Playing games for early grade mathematical learning in multilingual Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education classrooms

Abstract

Background: The study investigated how Bala Wande game-based activities shaped Grade 1 students’ participation, language use and mathematical meaning-making within a Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education (MTBBE) context, drawing on video data of teachers using the bilingual Bala Wande intervention programme.
Aim: The aim was to demonstrate how mathematics games strengthen early grade learning within a MTBBE context.
Setting: The dataset comprised 17 classroom videos across three South African provinces of teachers identified as implementing the Bala Wande programme with high fidelity.
Methods: An in-depth secondary analysis was conducted on four episodes of the videos’ mathematics games. The analysis examined teacher control, student participation, and the use of mathematical and linguistic resources to understand how game-based activities created opportunities for structured mathematical and language learning.
Results: Games in MTBBE classrooms are more than motivational tools. They enable students to draw flexibly on more than one language, while engaging in mathematical discourse, negotiating meaning, developing mathematical practices, and gaining confidence in communicating mathematical ideas.
Conclusion: Mathematics games provide structured opportunities for learning and consolidation of mathematical concepts while fostering active participation and multilingual mathematical reasoning and communication, supporting both mathematical and bilingual language development.
Contribution: The study advances multilingual mathematics education, showing how games create socially mediated and linguistically flexible learning opportunities. Using a situated learning perspective, it conceptualises multilingual mathematics learning as participation in social practices and how MTBBE, translanguaging and play-based pedagogy support mathematical understanding and language development.