Mathematics in Actions and Gestures – A Young Learner’s Diagrammatic Reasoning

Considering a semiotic perspective this paper focuses on the mathematical actions and gestures of a 4-year-old boy on variously shaped and colored wooden figures in different amounts while he interacts with a group of another three kids and an accompanying person in a German kindergarten. The paper investigates the boy’s elaboration of a first trial of counting all green and blue dogs in front of him and his development of a colored pattern in gesture and action while he participates in the ongoing interaction in his speech. Even if the originally assumed mathematical area was numbers and operations, the situation was an open offer for the learners with the freedom to address different mathematical ideas. By dint of a semiotic analysis, it is shown that the boy uses his multimodal interaction skills in different ways, focusing same or different mathematical ideas of number determination in different modes. Theoretically the first empirical findings give rise to potentially rethink the notion of multimodality as to be not always an interwoven but sometimes a phased-wise parallel proceeding construction in mathematical interaction or learning.