Critical Reading (AVID): What are the languages of math?

My journey as the AVID Site Coordinator and AVID Elective teacher began in 2012. I also teach 6th and 7th-grade math using the Common Core Standards. After attending my first AVID professional development training, I returned to my classroom revved up to apply new teaching strategies, to ditch the worksheets, to increase student discourse, and committed to teaching my math students how to read critically in math. My head spun with ideas on how to WICORize my lessons (sorry for the AVID jargon for the non-AVID folks). Then, reality hit. Try as I may, I could not readily apply strategies for marking the text with my math textbook. Hence, this series of mathematically based critical reading articles and vocabulary development activities. Pick, choose, and use what you like. I have intentionally included a variety of strategies.

Teaching students how to critically read in math differs from teaching reading strategies in other disciplines. Mathematics texts are written in a compact style that incorporates many concepts in a few sentences. When students pull out their highlighters and identify essential ideas in the text, they end up with a block of the highlighted text, which is far from helpful. Mathematics texts also include symbols representing concepts or numbers, graphs representing relationships, and page layouts that require students to look at various places on the page to understand the entire concept.

Word problems present unique challenges. In a word problem, the critical idea is at the end of the paragraph rather than at the beginning. Rather than being a statement, the key idea is in the form of a question. "Small" words contain big math concepts. When a student reads the word "of" in a math problem, it can have several possible meanings. It can mean the operation multiply, and it can be a preposition used to show a relationship between two different things or identify a part of a ratio. The simplest of all words "and" can mean "addition," depending on the context of its use. Math has an academic language all of its own, as well as its non-academic language. YIKES! No wonder students get confused when they read in math. Students need purposeful instruction in reading a mathematics text, holding the meaning of mathematical language in their minds, and creating visual images of the text as they read.

When I started my journey, adding critical reading and vocabulary development to my math curriculum, I worried about not having enough time to "practice" the “processes of math.” I thought, "my kids are not operating at grade level. How can I take time away from practicing math facts (fill in the blank...whatever skill deficit you have with your student population) to teach reading". You can imagine my surprise at how students grew in their independence, reading like mathematicians. I no longer spent my time "interpreting" the word problems and text. I spent my class time dialoguing with students about their mathematical thinking. I also heard my students using the language of math with their peers as they discussed problems. I had a revolution of mathematical thinking in my classroom. I had a “teacher” revelation that when students read like a mathematician, they problem-solve like a mathematician.

I invite you to create your own revolution of mathematical readers, thinkers, and problem-solvers in your classroom.