METAPHORS AND OTHER LINGUISTIC POINTERS TO CHILDREN'S MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS

The mental representations that 6- and 7-year-old pupils form as a result of their interactions with their teacher's verbal, written, pictorial and concrete material representations has to be inferred from the language they use. In this study many pupils seem to have mental representations which capture surface characteristics of a particular teachers’ representation and use metaphoric language associated with that representation when describing their calculations. Pupils’ use of ‘you’ is characteristic of those who adopt a representation-specific procedure, whilst ‘if’ and ‘like’ are linguistic pointers to their use of generic examples to describe a procedure. Individual pupils show a preference for the same style of mental representation when describing images and procedures in mathematical and non-mathematical contexts.