Reflection 2: Content Specific Reading Skills and Text Sets

This week's readings in Tovani had us consider how exactly literacy is used in content areas besides English, and what skills are relevant in different content areas. Reading a math text is different than reading a short story is different than reading an article from a science journal, and all require specific literacy skills to be read meaningfully. The book talks at length about how we as teachers are expert readers in our content areas and fluidly and automatically use our content-specific skills to make sense of a text -- but our students are not (yet) expert readers in this area. They don't know to employ these skills that we use without recognizing it. It is crucial that we, as good readers of content-area text, slow down our thinking and strategy use so that students can see how good readers handle particular types of text. I can think of two ways this is particularly relevant to math: first, math has its own terse variety of English; second, math textbooks often have a particular structure that is sometimes difficult for students to follow. Math uses English in a very compact way, where modifiers drastically change the meaning of a noun, but yet no redundancies are built in. (Consider the example "If A and B are finite sets, |A| is greater than or equal to |B|, and f is a function f:A->B, then the function f is surjective," and "If A and B are finite sets, |A| is greater than or equal to |B|, and f is a function f:A->B, then there exists a surjective function f." The first is false, the second true; and the the key difference is "the" or "a" -- the definite versus indefinite articles.) Modeling precise reading and interpretation of mathematical properties is a crucial aspect of my pedagogy because it is not a skill present in other disciplines. I would have to explicitly discuss the meanings of 'the' and 'a' in a literary sense in the previous example, and talk about the mathematical implications thereof. Math also requires a particular heuristic for problem solving. I had a discussion recently with some other teachers in my school's math department about how much I hated KWL charts (sorry Sterg), which sparked a conversation about using them in other subject areas or as framework for a lesson. As it turns out, we found a modified KWL chart online that is perfect for scaffolding word problems for students. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen the panic-give up response to word problems in students.) The structure aspect of math texts is particularly interesting for me at this moment because in one of the classes I'm co-teaching, we use presentations made from various book and website clippings for direct instruction. Students are allowed to use these presentations as resources on their mini-quizzes, but I've had several quizzes turned in blank because students can't seem to find the relevant material in their presentation notes. Now that I've considered how important structure (even just on a graphic/layout level) is to the understanding of a mathematical text, this may be attributable to inconsistent structures among our sources and a lack of strategies in my students for recognizing different structures in math text.