Teacher positioning impact on students’ learning opportunities in multilingual mathematics classrooms

Through the lens of positioning theory, we analyzed two monolingual teachers’ mathematics lessons in multilingual elementary classrooms, focusing on learning opportunities. Despite their efforts to use various strategies for multilingual students, these teachers often did not position multilingual students as capable problem-solvers or independent learners. Even though the teachers intended to ensure equal learning opportunities among multilingual and monolingual students, disparities emerged in how teachers perceived the duties and rights of themselves and their students. Our findings suggest that teachers’ self-perceptions as educators significantly influence their structuring of tasks and facilitation of classroom discourse, which can either enrich or constrain students’ learning experiences. In the context of South Korea, where research on teachers’ responses to the increasing multilingual student population remains limited, our study highlights the potential misalignment between teachers’ support strategies and their positioning of multilingual students. This underscores the need for teachers to critically examine not only deficit perspectives about multilingual students but also their roles in creating meaningful and inclusive mathematics learning opportunities.