Multilingual classrooms are the normal learning contexts for most children throughout the world. However not all such contexts are identical. This distinction is not always made in the literature. In this paper the multilingual context for classrooms in many urban classrooms in Australia is described before exploring a possible model that might be of use in guiding the teaching of mathematical language. Some extensions are considered that might be applied to other multilingual classroom contexts. (Contains 2 footnotes and 4 figures.)