I didn't end up using a website from the links in this assignment. I actually searched Language Acquisition AND math.I hope that's okay because I wanted to make this assignment (and program) as relevant to what I'm doing in the classroom as possible. I found some really interesting articles, and I ended up reading about five! The articles all centered around the idea that learning mathematics is very similar to learning a foreign language. I thought that was really interesting! I always hated foreign language. For whatever reason, even after taking about six years of Spanish in school, I was convinced I was bad at it and I really didn't try to get good at it because I had that bad attitude about my ability. The articles I read liken learning a foreign language to learning math. That certainly makes sense to me when you think about math as a symbol system (much like the symbols used in Japanese or any other language). Many of the authors stated that understanding the vocabulary and symbolic translation of math is essential to conceptual understand, and I would agree.
I read about a college professor who teaches a course called The Language of Mathematics. I was able to read through the instructor's manual of the textbook that outlines the course and gives background about the curriculum. It's incredibly interesting because it reads like a foreign language book. The beginning chapters focus on vocabulary (including having students complete oral exercises where they read symbolic expressions aloud), and the later chapters build into sentences, variables, and connectives. The afterward was fantastic because it talked about "math-anxious" students and how to help them. Here again, he emphasizes the importance of students reading mathematics aloud to develop the appropriate language skills. He also encourages teachers to ease students' anxiety by explaining that mathematics is like learning a language. Just like you can't learn Japanese in a day, you can't learn math in a day either!
Finally, I found an article/book about writing projects to assign in college-level mathematics. I'm teaching AP Calculus for the first time this year and I'm seeing students struggle with justifying their answers and writing proof appropriately. They can "crunch" the numbers, but they can't formally describe why they are doing it. Here is something I want to read with my students this week: "For most of your life so far, the only kind of writing you've done in math classes has been on homeworks and tests, and for most of your life you've explained your work to people that know more mathematics than you do (that is, to your teachers). But soon, this will change. Now that you are taking Calculus, you know far more mathematics than the average American has ever learned - indeed, you know more mathematics than most college graduates remember. With each additional mathematics course you take, you further distance yourself from the average person on the stress. You may feel like the mathematics you can do is simple and obvious (doesn't everybody know what a function is?), but you can be sure that other people find it bewilderingly complex. It becomes increasingly important, therefore, that you can explain what you're doing to other that might be interested: your parents, your boss, the media [AP GRADERS]....But most of all, one of the simplest reasons for writing in a math class is that writing helps you learn mathematics better. By explaining a difficult concept to other people, you end up explaining it to yourself." -Dr. Annalisa Crannell
I can't wait to read that to them, and I think I will put it on my syllabus Day 1 next year!
Here are links to all of the articles I read:
Link 2 (Links to an external site.)
Link (Links to an external site.)3