Disciplinary literacy in mathematics: One mathematician’s reading practices

Highlights

• The mathematician read widely and deeply as part of his social practice.

• The mathematician used an array of strategies to help him make sense of the text.

• These strategies include close reading, summarizing, paraphrasing, storying, questioning, evaluating, and visualizing.

• These findings, together with those of prior research, challenge the singular notions of correct disciplinary reading.

Abstract

Recent scholarship on disciplinary literacy calls for an emphasis on teaching discipline-specific language/literacy practices. An understanding of these practices is, therefore, essential to literacy instruction in secondary content areas such as mathematics. This case study examined one mathematician’s reading practices, with a focus on the strategies he used in text comprehension. Data collected include the mathematician’s think-alouds during reading, discussion of his reading think-alouds, and semi-structured interviews. These data were analyzed qualitatively through an iterative process involving multiple readings and identification and refinement of codes. The analysis revealed that the mathematician engaged in extensive reading and employed an array of strategies—rereading, close reading, monitoring and questioning, summarizing and paraphrasing, storying, drawing on prior knowledge and experience, evaluating and verifying, and note-taking and visualizing—to help him make sense of what he read. These findings provide important insights that can inform mathematics teachers’ efforts to support students’ mathematics reading/learning.

Introduction

Recent scholarship on secondary literacy calls on content area teachers to shift from teaching basic skills (e.g., vocabulary, fluency) and generic reading strategies (e.g., inferring, summarizing, questioning, note taking) to teaching discipline-specific language and literacy practices. Moje (2008), for example, exhorted teachers educators to “build disciplinary literacy instructional program, rather than to merely encourage content teachers to employ literacy teaching practices and strategies” (p. 96). The Common Core State Standards highlighted the need to develop students’ capacities to read “with an appreciation of the norms and conventions of each discipline” in order to be ready for college and career (NGA & CCSSO, 2010, p. 2). In mathematics, students are likewise expected to ‘learn to think mathematically’ and to develop proficiency with the ‘language of mathematics’ as part of their goals in learning mathematics and developing mathematics literacy (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000).

This emphasis on disciplinary literacy augurs the need for content area (including mathematics) teachers to develop a deep understanding of the specialized language and literacy practices in their discipline. One discipline that has garnered comparatively less attention in this line work is mathematics. Our study attempts to fill the need by identifying some of the reading strategies that mathematicians used in their meaning-making practices. If a key goal of mathematics education is to enable students to engage in “authentic mathematics”—that is, to adopt practices that resemble those of professional mathematicians—then a more precise understanding is needed of how mathematicians make meaning in their literate practices. Without this understanding, Inglis and Alcock (2012) cautioned, teachers may inadvertently develop activities that are authentic to perceptions of mathematics practice but inauthentic to actual mathematical practice.