ABSTRACT
Language knowledge and language use increase and diversify immensely in the school years, linking spoken and written abilities and reflecting cognitive growth and the acquisition of new knowledge domains such as mathematics and sciences. Each new discipline learned at school entails learning new lexical items and domain-specific uses of syntactic constructions, thus enriching general language proficiency in schoolchildren. Mathematics is one of the central disciplines taught in grade school from early on, as it underlies all the exact sciences. The mathematical domain requires linguistic thinking of a novel kind—in fact, children need to learn a genre-specific type of “language”: on the one hand, the symbolic and formal system of referring to mathematical entities and processes and, on the other, the mathematically oriented domain-specific usage of lexical items and syntactic constructions that might have different meanings in mathematics than in general language (Mestre, 1988).
