The view of learning as a particular type of the activity of communicating with others and with oneself has already been shown to unify the once separate lines of study devoted to cognitive and to social aspects of learning. This approach is now extended so as to include the study of affect. In this article, emotional expressions are treated as an…

Quite diverse in their foci and specific themes, the seven articles collected in this special issue are unified by their common conceptual framework. Grounded in the premise that thinking can be usefully defined as self-communicating and that mathematics can thus be viewed as a discourse, the communicational framework provides a unified set of…

Taking as the point of departure the vision of school algebra as a formalized meta-discourse of arithmetic, we have been following five pairs of 7th grade students as they progress in algebraic discourse during 24 months, from their informal algebraic talk to the formal algebraic discourse, as taught in school. Our analysis follows changes that…

This study investigates the impact of language on students' learning of mathematics. A comparison has been made between English and Korean speaking university students' discourses on "infinity". In Korean, unlike in English, there is a disconnection between colloquial and mathematical discourses on infinity, in that the mathematical word for…