Focuses on the acquisition of mathematical language. Through asking how one can reflect on things one cannot name, examines students' opportunities to practice mathematical language in two classrooms. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education) (Author/VWL)

Examines the role of a teacher in disrupting a discursive practice, allowing both teacher and learner space to form new empowering identities.(Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education) (Author/VWL)

Shows how one of his ruling passions, the weather, led a teenage boy to engage in a variety of reading practices (and associated writing practices) in a variety of semiotic modes, drawing in different ways on numeracy knowledge. Concludes by arguing that both research on multi-modality and the New Literacy Studies point in a similar direction:…

Adult basic education (ABE) is an ideal venue for developing health literacy skills. Literacy and numeracy assessments used in ABE were identified and the most common were examined for health components. Only the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS) included health. The two most common health literacy assessments used in general…

This article draws on a sociocultural activity theory approach to identify considerations in the development of technology mediated mathematics education for learners at the post-compulsory level. It suggests that the use of technology should be aligned with the intended goals and objectives of the learning. In particular, it is necessary to take…

The ratio between the 2nd and 4th fingers (2D:4D)--a potential proxy for prenatal testosterone (T) exposure--shows a sex difference, with males usually having lower mean values; the latter potentially indicates higher prenatal T exposure. We studied relations between 2D:4D and competencies in the domains of counting, number knowledge, and…

One of the most important goals in primary education is to guarantee literacy and numeracy, two crucial notational systems. Before schooling, children develop some fundamental knowledge on notations from which formal learning should depart. The literature has studied this knowledge, focusing on the development of notational production and…

The relationship among working memory, mathematic ability, and the cognitive impairment of children with difficulties in mathematics was examined. A group of children with difficulties in mathematics (MD) was compared with a group of children with a normal level of achievement matched for vocabulary, age, and gender (N=49). The children were…

I draw attention to the distinction between reductionist views of "language" and the rich and complex ways in which we might approach language as social practice and suggest the latter view is evident in the set of papers collected here. Socially oriented linguists, including those in New Literacy Studies (NLS), look beyond reductionism, to…

Four experiments used a preferential looking method to investigate 6-month-old infants' capacity to represent numerosity in visual-spatial displays. Building on previous findings that such infants discriminate between arrays of eight versus 16 discs, but not eight versus 12 discs (Xu & Spelke, 2000), Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether…

In this article, the author discusses the Soroban (Japanese abacus) in the age of computers and its structure. Since the advent of computers, the Soroban has started to shift from being used purely as a calculating device to being a useful tool in general mathematics education. The beauty of the Soroban is that it represents numbers exactly as you…

While attending a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course, this author was provided with the time and encouragement to try out different activities, styles, and strategies of teaching. She used this time to develop numeracy starter lessons with Y7 students, spending two weeks with each of four sets of students. She decided from the…

Citing that the concept of fractions is not a single idea, and that students may be proficient in one area of fractions while also holding contradictory beliefs, the writer reviews some common problems areas in teaching and learning about fractions, and maintains that the fraction concept does not respond to simple remediation methods. The author…

The study investigated the influence of gender, course of study and numerical ability (independent variables) on secondary school students' achievement in Practical Geography (dependent variable). Purposive sampling was used to select four co-educational secondary schools established in the same year. A sample of 367 Geography students (157…

This article describes an example of a fourth-grade lesson from Taiwan in which number sense is developed through real classroom interactions.