Literacy Reading a Maths Text

There are many skills or strategies employed when reading a text. When a student reaches secondary school it is expected that these skills are fully developed and automatically used. These skills are taught directly at primary school but for many of our students these skills are weak or underdeveloped and many students have trouble comprehending what they read.

You may have noticed how some students do not adequately scan a text and as a result do not make a relevant prediction and do not know the topic before reading. To address the literacy needs of our students’ we need to teach questioning, clarifying and summarizing skills alongside disciplinary tasks. Students often have a single reading speed and don’t use their strategies to repair their comprehension when understanding breaks down.

Hand Span Measurements

 

Maths questions are the hard sums of reading comprehension and the average maths texts tend to exhibit what is referred to as Lexical Density. That means a lot of meaning is packed into four or five lines of text. As a result, students often encounter difficulty separating the topic from the instructions found in a question.

In a page of maths calculations, there are frequently numerous technical topics loaded with unstated meaning or context. For example, measuring and recording hand span data would normally be associated with a number of different fields of research or occupations. Mature readers instantly use prior knowledge to visual hand span research and may make relevant connections:

• to physiotherapy or occupational safety studies  
• to the use and teaching of musical instruments like the guitar and the keyboards
• to research associated with accident recovery rates due to hand injuries

and even

• to the hazards associated with avocado stone removal and personal injury

Comprehension of maths questions can also be hindered by ellipses or substitution, where the topic in a question is replaced by a pronoun or in many cases is left unstated. The unusual use of the minor sentence ‘Explain.’ is a difficult word and loaded with various interpretations. When you combine these features with maths related function and topic vocabulary it’s not surprising that students have difficulty bringing meaning to a calculation.

One simple way to check student understanding of a question is to ask them to restate or rewrite a question in their own words. One easy example of a solution to these problems involves using Information Transfers. This improves a student’s familiarity with the language features of maths questions and it also helps students break down a question into manageable parts. Student comprehension is aided when they are required to reread a text, comprehension is also aided as they become aware of the grammatical features of that text.

The words, grammatical features, can be intimidating but an understanding of a few basic grammatical structures can dramatically improve the way students tackle a reading task. Getting students to explicitly unpack: topic words, technical words, action verbs, imperatives, nouns, pronouns and relational verbs will improve comprehension.