Professional language functions as the medium by which the academic community analyse and theorise the phenomena for which the mathematics classroom is the setting. This professional language also sets bounds on researchers’ capacity to articulate theory concerning those practices. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that our lived experience is mediated significantly by our capacity to name and categorise our world. “We see and hear … very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation,” (Sapir, 1949, p. 162). Speakers of one language have access to terms, and therefore to perceptive possibilities, that may not be available to speakers of another language. Different communities, speaking different languages, employ different naming systems to describe the events, actions and interactions of the mathematics classroom.
A technical or professional language (in English) to describe and analyse practice in teaching has been previously reported as lacking or underdeveloped (Lortie, 1975; Lampert, 2000; Grossman 2009). Lampert (2000) has concluded that the lack of opportunities to work collaboratively with peers on the problems of practice result in “a language of practice [that] remains flat or nonexistent” (p.90). Connell (2009) has similarly observed that the organisational culture of the teaching profession does not appear to support the “the informal processes by which practical know-how is passed to new teachers in on-the-job learning” (p. 223) and that a culture that might do so needs to be purposefully fostered.
In documenting the Czech professional language of mathematics teachers, the team of researchers and experienced teachers faced similar obstacles that Czech researchers, educators and teachers in all subjects including didactics of mathematics face; that the language used in the subject didactics should form the basis for descriptions of lessons from both the researcher’s and the teacher’s perspective. However, the subject didactics in the Czech Republic are presently in the process of reconstitution. When creating new theories, researchers in subject didactics focus on development of onto-didactical and psycho-didactical dimensions of the domain and of research in the subject didactics as well as on confrontation of various directions in didactical thinking. These efforts can be expected to precise the used terminology (Janík and Stuchlíková, 2015).
This presentation draws on an international project that set out to document the professional language employed in nine countries (Australia, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the USA) for the description of middle school mathematics classrooms. Our initial interest is lexical and concerns the actual terms by which students, teachers and researchers name the objects in their respective worlds. Documentation of the content and structure of classroom-related lexicons in nine countries reveals patterns of connection in the pedagogical terminology in each country, as well as the practical enactment of cultural-historical differences encrypted in the terms by which classroom phenomena are named and from which each community constructs its instruction and its theory.
If the Australian (or Czech) teacher’s conception of the mathematics classroom is constructed around activities that they can name, then it may follow that they are unlikely to engage in activities that they cannot name. Marton and Tsui (2004) suggest that categories not only express the social structure but also create the need for people to conform to the behaviour associated with these categories (p. 28). Thus teachers’ activity in the classroom is guided by those practices they are able to name, compelling their behaviour to correspond to this familiar construction of practice. Comparison of the lexicons of Australian and Czech Republic middle school mathematics teachers indicates the variation possible within two Western teaching communities with different pedagogical traditions.