Taking as a point of departure the vision of school algebra as a formalized meta-discourse of arithmetic, we have been following six pairs of 7th-grade students (12-13 years old) as they gradually modify their spontaneous meta-arithmetic toward the "official" algebraic form of talk. In this paper we take a look at the very beginning of…

This paper presents a rationale and a conceptual framework for a wider research project dealing with mathematical communication, and in particular with actions performed by interlocutors whenever they wish to clarify their use of a symbol, a word or an expression. The aim of such actions is often to repair a communicational breach resulting from…