Content Area Literacy in the Mathematics Classroom

Content area literacy has an important role in helping students understand content in specific disciplines, such as mathematics. Although the strategies are not unique to each individual content area, they are often adapted for use in a specific discipline. For example, mathematicians use mathematical language to make sense of new ideas and information and to organize that information in a specialized way. Content literacy strategies can help mathematics students accomplish these goals. In this article, we will discuss six practical strategies to help build students' content skills in the mathematics classroom and they are: the Frayer model, question generation, visual supports, think-alouds, writing to learn, and text reading.