Learning Mathematics through Conversation: Is It as Good as They Say?.

All this souods quite reasonable. In a wmld overpowered by cellular telephones, fax machines and computer networks, where 'communication' has become the name of the game and where people are consumed with the desire to talk on everything to everybody, the request to tum mathematics classrooms into another site for interpersonal exchange seems only natural. No wonder then that we may be ready to join the 'communication camp' without questioning [2] Most of us would accept the clainrs about the need to foster students' ability to speak mathematically as a basic, almost self-evident truth It is the goal of the present discussion to turn the seemingly obvious into an object of critical inspection In what follows, the various authors try to uopack their respective faiths in the importance of mathematical conversation in an effort either to reinforce it or to refute it through a disciplined analysis At the outset, I scrutinise three basic arguments which can often be heard from advocates of mathematical communication, coming from well-developed, overarching conceptual frameworks which attract many followers. In spite of such impressive fouodations, on closer examination each one of the three lines of argument reveals some weaknesses