Abstract
Acquisition of algebraic language is one of the turning points that allow the student to develop advanced mathematical thinking. There are several theoretical schemes that analyse this process both in syntactical and semantic aspects. In all these schemes, language plays a fundamental role, as does the work on making explicit the processes through which one passes from situations to a first mathematical modelling, which uses letters and relations between them. In this empirical work, we analyse the answers given by a large sample of students in Grade 08 to a question that required to move from a geometric situation to its algebraic modelling. The use of a large amount of data coming from a large-scale survey allows an "ongoing" description of possible stages of development of algebraic thought and of maturity of symbolic thought.