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In a mathematics class where students are encouraged to freely share ideas, the room brims with diverse thoughts. How do students and teachers use them? Let’s follow a group of multilingual students and teachers to see what they did with an idea! 

This work studies mathematics word problems’ use in a classroom of recent immigrants, or newcomers, to a United States public elementary school. I study how word problems foster the recontextualization of mathematical concepts in a lived real- ity experienced by newcomer students in their new cultural and educational setting. In this study’s setting language plays a significant role in the process of meaning-making. I describe how language use in word problems remains intertwined with mathematics instruction. This opens a space for questioning word problems’ purpose and role in multilingual classrooms, and I highlight how the creative process of co-constructing problems’ meaning in this context can expand notions of genre applied to word problems. Throughout I adopt a theorization of translanguaging as a language practice and apply it in problem discussion. This helps probe how language use impacts students’ ways of understanding and utilizing mathematical concepts.