Discipline Specific Academic Language—Math

Excerpted from: Zwiers, Jeff. Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Math’s language and thinking can be even more foreign than that of the other content areas. The development of math language and literacy can be more challenging than in other subjects for the following reasons:

●A student must learn to decipher and use a wide range of symbols. There is often a range of symbols, numbers, letters, illustrations, and words mixed together in problems.

●A student must read not only left to right bur right to left, up and down, and even diagonally when reading graphs and tables, for example.

●Math texts have denser concentration of abstract concepts than other academic texts (Thomson, 1988). There are more concepts per sentence for a brain to process. Math texts are tightly connected, and each word and phrase is important to process—a student who skims will miss key points.

●Historically, there has been a lack of extended student talk about math in math classes.

Research has demonstrated that many teachers avoid using mathematical (academic) terms to explain the concepts and processes. Although the simplification of math language into every day language may enable students to solve problems in the short term, this form of linguistic “enabling” can be harmful in the long run for students because it results in their missing out on the foundational concepts of math. In order for students to know why something works, they need the proper language and terminology.

Thinking Skill of Problem Solving in Math

ELLs often need heavy scaffolding and modeling of problem solving steps such as: stating something in their own words, noticing key information, interpreting pictures and graphs, finding clue words, comparing the problem to a previous one, making a plan, listing what they need to know, drawing, guessing and checking, and finding patterns, and reflecting on the reasonableness of an answer. The following table lists expressions that are often used to solve problems and explain their answers:

Expressions Used in Problem Solving
We need to figure out exactly what they want.
Lets break it down into parts. First, …
Information that I need is … because …
There are different ways to solve it.
The best solution is … because …
I predict that …
We can draw this part as …
We can check our answer by trying …
I don’t think this information is important because … / I bet that … because …
This is like the problem we did on …
We need to identify the …
We don’t know …, so let’s make it a variable.
Maybe a data table will work because …
I think we need to try another way.
I think the answer is … because …
This word means that the final

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