Oracy in Mathematics

Daykin, A. R. (2004). Oracy’s central role in teaching mathematics effectively to EAL students. International Schools Journal, 23(2), 57-66.

Background

The author feels that there is a general perception that maths is less language-dependent than other subjects such as the humanities and sciences. He feels that high-quality maths teaching cannot take place without students regularly communicating ideas orally.

Aims

The author intends to show how various practices can help students develop cognitively and linguistically through talk in the maths lesson.

Sample

As this is not a research report, no sample data is used.

Method

The author reviews the ideas and studies of a number of different writers.

Findings

The writer suggests a number of simple approaches that can be used to achieve increased talk in the classroom. These included teachers asking students to explain their thinking, giving more wait-time after questions, praising all contributions, encouraging students to expand on their answers and avoiding answering themselves. He warns that results will not be immediate as it will take time for students to acclimatize to the new conditions.

He suggests that there are two ways of simplifying difficult tasks, especially in the earlier stages of learning maths. The teacher can either make the task and related language less cognitively demanding or move it into a context that can be more easily understood. He suggests that students must learn the concepts and related language in preparation for later, more complex concepts that build on the concepts that are currently being learnt and thus it is more appropriate giving a relevant context than simplifying the language or concept.

One particularly interesting activity suggested is to give pairs or groups within the class different tasks to solve. They must then explain the task and how they solved it to the rest of the class who will later be doing the same task for homework. The class is allowed to question the reporting pair or group. In this way, the whole class has an interest in the explanation being given.

Implications

The author suggests that cognitive, metacognitve and linguistic development are especially closely linked in maths. He believe that such skills as hypothesizing, generalizing, predicting, testing and verifying are linguistically and cognitively closely related developmentally and thus discussion of concepts and processes is particularly important in the maths class.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.