How Doctoral Students Construe their Mathematics when Communicating their Research

Communication plays a crucial role in doing, learning, and teaching mathematics, and spoken and written communication skills are essential for academics, including mathematicians, when conducting research and disseminating results. Building on the role of communication in mathematics and in the process of becoming mathematicians, this study investigates how mathematics doctoral students communicate their research beyond the written format. I use commognition and systemic functional linguistics to explore how three doctoral students communicated their research to a doctoral student in mathematics education and their peers. I focus on how participants implemented five communication strategies largely investigated by researchers in applied linguistics and related to aspects of teaching, learning, and doing mathematics. Additionally, I investigate the messages that doctoral students implicitly conveyed about the nature of mathematics when communicating their research. Findings illustrate that students implemented the strategy defining in a broad variety of ways, often different from formal definitions usually found in written communication. In the case of analogising, students used this strategy as a means of referring and talking about objects, their properties, and their behaviour without technical terminology. For exemplifying, participants used examples from various discourses to bring clarity and support claims, but also to introduce terminology. When reformulating, participants moved across various forms of talk, implicitly reformulated, and summarised detailed explanations into one or two sentences. Finally, for the strategy concretising, I reframed it as omitting as a result of the preliminary analysis of concretising. When omitting, students explicitly signalled to their audience that they were leaving out details from their research and omitted their specialised discourse or concepts altogether. As for the messages students implicitly shared about the nature of mathematics, participants construed mathematical objects as acontextual entities, as outcomes of humans’ manipulations, and as discursive constructs, and they implicitly described doing mathematics as involving discursive, observational and material activities. Findings about the implementation of each strategy contribute to describing how doctoral students communicate their research, which is a first step towards supporting them in developing their communication skills. Findings also contribute to a better understanding of the process of becoming mathematicians from an onto-epistemological perspective.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Mathematics Education

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• L'Italien-Bruneau, Rox-Anne

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Marmur, Ofer
• Yoon, Caroline
• Darragh, Lisa

• Mathematical Communication
• Doctoral Students

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/74688

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/74688