Taking as the point of departure the vision of school algebra as a formalized meta-discourse of arithmetic, we have been following five pairs of 7th grade students as they progress in algebraic discourse during 24 months, from their informal algebraic talk to the formal algebraic discourse, as taught in school. Our analysis follows changes that…

The view of learning as a particular type of the activity of communicating with others and with oneself has already been shown to unify the once separate lines of study devoted to cognitive and to social aspects of learning. This approach is now extended so as to include the study of affect. In this article, emotional expressions are treated as an…