Classroom Interpreting Games with an Illustration

Classroom communication has been recognized as a process in which ideas become objects of reflection, discussion, and amendments affording the construction of private mathematical meanings that in the process become public and exposed to justification and validation. This paper describes an explanatory model named “interpreting games”, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, that accounts for the interdependence between thought and communication and the interpretation of signs in which teacher and students engage in mathematics classrooms. Interpreting games account both for the process of transformation (in the mind of the learner) of written marks into mathematical signs that stand for mathematical concepts and for the continuous and converging private construction of mathematical concepts. Teacher–student and student–student collaborative interactions establish a mathematical communication that shapes and is also shaped by the conceptual domains and the domains of intentions and interpretations of the participants. A teaching episode with third graders is analyzed as an example of a classroom interpreting game.