The Australian National Lexicon consists of 63 terms considered familiar and in widespread use by Australian teachers of middle school mathematics. The lexicon was developed with the collaborative involvement of key members of the mathematics education community and each term is illustrated with a description of both its form and its function, together with examples and non-examples. The national lexicon is arranged in five categories also developed in consultation with experienced teachers: Administration (8 terms); Assessment (11 terms); Classroom Management (6 terms), Learning Strategies (27 terms) and Teaching Strategies (50 terms). Terms may appear in more than one category. This research project shares attributes with the discipline of anthropology as its goal is the construction of a cultural artefact. It also has some commonality with the methods of the applied ethnographer, as insights are generated through the perspective of the ‘insider’ (Hoey, 2014; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). Our key insiders, a select group of experienced teachers, played a major part in negotiating and documenting the Australian Lexicon, whilst members of the broader teaching community participated in the validation of the lexicon. A process of local validation was conducted to investigate the extent to which the local community of mathematics education researchers would endorse the purpose, the structure, and the constituent terms of the Australian Lexicon. The second phase of the two-step validation process involved a national online survey. Six questionnaires were created and each survey participant was randomly assigned one of the questionnaires. The criterion for inclusion of a term in the lexicon was that over two-thirds of respondents described the term as “familiar” or “very familiar.” By this criterion, all of the 63 terms were validated for inclusion in the national Australian lexicon. When questioned about the use of these terms in conversations with colleagues, however, responses spanned the full five-point scale from ‘Used extremely often’ to ‘Not at all used’. This may support Connell’s (2009) assertion that a lively occupational culture in teaching in Australia is not always present. Indeed, if there are few opportunities for teachers to work collaboratively with peers on the problems of practice, the use of lexical terms in conversation with colleagues might not necessarily match the relatively high levels of individual familiarity with the terms. In this presentation, more detailed results will be reported outlining the structure of the Australian lexicon and distinguishing familiarity from use for different sub-communities within the teacher sample.

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