To what degree can multilingual students profit from bilingual tea ching approaches, even when they lack experience in the academic or technical register in their home languages? This study explores this research question in a mixed methods design for a German/Turkish bilingual intervention aimed at The sample consisted of German/Turkish bilingual students (n = 128) in Grade 7 in German schools without prior formal mathematics education in Turkish. In a randomized control trial, the bilingual intervention was compared to the corresponding monolingual intervention and a control group. A repeated ana lysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that students in both interventions had significantly higher learning gains than in the control group, and in fact profited equally from both interventions, although some time and effort was required for overcoming initial barriers in the home language and especially in the academic register. A qualitative analysis of the videotaped bilingual learning processes revealed insights into specific obstacles and chances of connecting both languages in order to foster conceptual understanding. The students with some formal language proficiency in Turkish seemed to profit even more from the bilingual intervention, but a rigid technical register was not necessary.

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The context of our article – relying on investigations of the interdisciplinary research project MuM-Multi on multilingualism in mathematics – consists of bi-/plurilingual learning processes, especially in secondary education. Based on a corpus of five remediating small group classes on fractions with up to five bilingual (Turkish–German) students, it is asked whether and how networks of mathematical representation modes correlate to networks of languages in use. Here we concentrate on Turkish as their home language (forced by teachers) in correlation to German as the common classroom language. By activating their home language, the students may (or may not) benefit with respect to their conceptual understanding of mathematical concepts. The qualitative analyses (considering nonverbal communication, verbal communication and material action) show that the intertwining of languages is due to different approaches in conceptualization and provides a better understanding especially in collective problem-solving constellations and for the consolidation of knowledge.

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