Learning to speak a language has intrigued me since my own sons were born and then continued to be something that I observed, reflected, and questioned when we lived in Germany and then Spain when our sons were young.
When our sons were infants my husband and I audio taped their sounds. Later when they were older we listened to those tapes and we were fascinated to hear language development! When you’re so close to an infant you don’t hear as much but if you can put yourself in a situation where you can objectively listen and it’s amazing what you hear.
In Germany and Spain I worked as a conversational English instructor at Berlitz School of Languages and it was that training that convinced me that the underlying motivation for learning to speak a language is the need to communicate. The more I could create a real need for communication the more a student would try to find the word to explain their thoughts.
Have you experienced trying to communicate an idea to someone whose first language is not English? If you really need to have them understand, you phrase the ideas you’re trying to express in different ways if the first way meets a blank stare. As they ask you questions, you respond. You ask/answer/ask/answer until you have communicated what you need them to understand. It’s not one way — it’s an exchange.
Mathematics is a language. We have to establish environments in which students feel a need to communicate. How do we create the need?
When you are communicating with someone and you don’t quite understand what they mean, you ask questions.
* I’m not sure I understand.
* How does that work?
* Why did you use “(insert a word)” – can you tell me what that means?
* Why did you say that?
* Can you tell me more?
I wonder how they might be communicating?
What happens when you think of your students as communicators?
Last Tweets
This post made me think a lot about some conversations I’ve had on Twitter about making lessons that students have something to say about. Whether it’s @mathalicious arguing that lessons should have “hooks” that students go home talking about (like, “listening to fast music will kill you!”) or @ddmeyer helping us think about crafting compelling questions or scenarios that get you wondering before giving you tons of support, or @k8nowak showing us lessons that every student has something to say about, because they are grounded in an experience or hands-on task that all students can do/participate in.
I kept thinking about the contrast between math that is told to you, “this is how we do it,” and math lessons that begin from an experience or task everyone can participate in and reflect on… students might communicate more, and put more effort into their talk, when they are interested in the question and it arises from an experience or task that they can make sense of and participate in with their whole brain or body.
As I read your thoughts, Max, my eye wandered to the photo that I posted of that geometric construction and I smiled thinking that some might argue that it has no relevance for students! And then I reflected on why I chose it to illustrate my point about communication. One reason I used it was because it was in my collection of photos saved in my iPhoto library but … why did it catch my eye? I love math that is visual and that includes geometric models, tilings, patterns, and just in general finding structure in the world. Those reflections (no pun intended really) led to a memory of a book that made a huge impression on me — The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. I honestly don’t remember if I read the book first or watched Bronowski’s series based on the book but I do know both the text of that book and Bronowski’s storytelling had a profound effect on me. In fact, I have a copy of the book on my bookshelf in the office (and a couple of copies at home) and for years I had a notebook with a laminated copy of page 159 decorating the cover.
For fun I just googled “pythagoras sand Ascent of Man Bronowski” and was thrilled to find this video: http://wn.com/Bronowski_on_Pythagoras.
Making sense of the world is why I’m drawn to Bronowski’s explanations! I know that it was one of the reasons I wrote lessons like Understanding Algebraic Factoring several years ago.