The Daily Bulletin Archive

By Mary A. Durlak

Math and literacy are considered so important that they are the subjects used most widely to measure the performance of students in primary and secondary schools. However, despite their significance, these two skills are widely viewed as distinct and separate.

Ellen Friedland, associate professor of elementary education and reading, is a literacy specialist who spent her fall 2008 sabbatical investigating how literacy strategies can be integrated into the math classroom to improve students’ understanding of math. Literacy strategies are instructional strategies used by teachers to help students develop skills in the language arts—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—and to facilitate comprehension in content areas such as social studies, science, foreign languages, and, of course, math.

“With my coauthors,” said Friedland, “two articles are in revision for possible publication.” One is aptly titled “Collaborating to Cross the Math-Literacy Divide: An Annotated Bibliography of Literacy Strategies for Mathematics Classrooms.” Pixita del Prado Hill, associate professor of elementary education and reading, and Susan McMillen, professor of mathematics, are the coauthors.

One of Friedland’s goals was to add to already-existing data that explores how math teachers integrate literacy strategies into math instruction. She completed an extensive literature review, reading more than 140 articles and books about middle- and secondary-school math preservice and in-service teachers’ attitudes toward, and integration of, literacy strategies. She also conducted research by observing, videotaping, and interviewing teachers integrating literacy strategies into their math instruction.

“Any organizational strategy is a kind of literacy strategy,” Friedland explained. For example, when teaching geometric shapes, a teacher can ask students to memorize the respective definitions of a parallelogram, a rhombus, a square, and a rectangle. However, a teacher can also use a semantic feature analysis, a grid that presents the shapes in relationship to each other. “Students understand difficult concepts better if literacy strategies are effectively integrated into content area instruction because they help students learn how to think,” Friedland said.

Friedland’s efforts to encourage content-area preservice teachers to integrate literacy strategies into their lesson plans extend to including field experience as part of their coursework. “Preservice teachers can see how it works for themselves,” she said. “They also develop a lesson plan that integrates literacy strategies.” She developed a course specifically for math and science education students.

“One of the good things to come out of this effort is that we’ve been taking an interdisciplinary approach,” said Friedland. “We learn so much from the different perspectives, and we are finding we have common ground. For example, both math and language use symbols to convey meaning.”

The data Friedland obtained from her sabbatical research was used for a presentation at the annual conference of the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics in 2009, given by Friedland, del Prado Hill, and McMillen. Friedland also developed an annotated bibliography of resources to help in-service math teachers find appropriate literacy strategies.

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Read previous Focus on Sabbatical stories:

Felix Armfield
Lisa Berglund
Betty Cappella
Ann Colley
Daniel Cunningham
Michael De Marco
Rob Delprino
Mark Fulk
Musa Abdul Hakim
Katherine Hartman
David Henry
Susan Leist
Andrew Nicholls
Wendy Paterson
M. Stephen Pendleton
Stephen Phelps
Jean Richardson
John Song
Carol Townsend
Jonathan Thornton
Aimable Twagilimana
Mark Warford
Michael Zborowski