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This article investigates how young multilingual children's mathematics learning is connected to their language use, lived experiences, contexts, and emotions. To this end, we consider the experiences of children who used both Spanish and English to learn mathematics. We center on two instances of kindergarten children counting and use Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as our theoretical framework to reflect on how words become meaningful in multiple ways as a result of context, particularly when used in more than one language. From this perspective, we pose that children's language use is affective and made meaningful through social relationships. We consider how the understandings of multilayered meanings uncovered using an SFL lens affords a substantial path to interpret and think about the language use of multilingual children during mathematics learning. We argue that careful attention to and interpretation of children's language can help counteract pervasive ideas of neutrality in education.

This article examines the shared experiences and understandings teachers draw on to teach children with an awareness of linguistic diversity. To do so, we analyzed interviews from Turkey and the United States and drew on philosophical hermeneutics as a way to develop a disruptive understanding of teachers' views regarding the role of languages in mathematics learning. We pose that teachers' perspectives about languages and children's ability to learn are challenged when there is an interruption, an event that fails to reflect the normative linguistic practices of hegemonic groups. We found teachers' understandings fluctuate as part of an organic sense-making process of events in their classrooms, portraying perspectives such as multilingual students' ability to learn, assumptions which limit expectations for children's learning, the ability of mathematics to be experienced as its own mode of communication, as well as a willingness to effectively teach children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]