Numeracy and Literacy – Understanding and Reflecting Upon the Interconnectedness

My journey as a teacher has been spent in building learning spaces, creating appropriate learning approaches, and trying to find solutions to learning problems for teachers and students aged 7 to 15 years old. Theirs have been backgrounds of challenges – of special needs, of everyday struggles with social and emotional discrimination, and varied layers of economic distress.

Scattered throughout the cities and villages, these students and teachers have been from different learning spaces, mainly including government schools and orphanages, private schools, NGO-operated support centers, railway platforms, informal settlements around brick kilns, and remote tribal clusters.

At Shikshamitra, our engagement as an organization in the area of elementary education has exclusively been channelized in providing foundational literacy and numeracy for these children, and sharing pedagogic knowledge with their teachers and guardians.

Reading provides both context and motivation for students of mathematics…

Basic Literacy enables learners to read and write in order to comprehend, express and justify their own thoughts and opinions, and to make an effort to empathize with and appreciate others better. Basic Numeracy nurtures the ability to understand the number concepts, to use numbers appropriately in all four operations, solve problems, look at patterns, and to estimate, analyze and interpret data. It is however, needless to mention that it is language first and foremost that is predominantly the means by which a learner ultimately comprehends and communicates – to grasp these numerical skills.

Getting Ready for Literacy and Numeracy: Pre-skills

An array of skills together referred to as ‘readiness’ or ‘pre-skills’ pave the way toward literacy and numeracy. Activities with different objects and pictures in matching, sorting, picking the odd-one-out, comparing and grading, completing patterns, listening, recalling, narrating, scribbling, painting, and speaking are the prerequisites that prepare learners for future skills in numeracy and literacy. It is interesting to note that all these readiness skills work in unison, through interdependence and complimenting with each other while laying the foundation.

For example, as a learner identifies with Goldilocks in the house of three bears, it is the little bear’s chair, food, and bed that quell the fear and offer comfort and safety equally to Goldilocks and the learner. Simultaneously, the learner warms up to the concepts of size, amounts and gradation within that same story.

Early literacy and numeracy skills are taught and learnt together. It is later in the primary school years, however, when we start separating language and mathematics into two different entities, that the conflict surfaces and deepens.

The Reality: Numeracy Becomes a Check for Literacy

We have often been witness to conflicts that can emerge out of math and language classes. It begins with students being unable to read and understand problems and word sums put before them in math class. Questions are then raised as to how the students were allowed to advance into that class with such poor literacy skills! Neither can they read with proper comprehension nor do they understand instructions, oral or written.

It is the interconnected learning that matters finally. Proficiency in literacy and numeracy prospers through the process of interconnection – as do all the other school subjects.

Moreover, most of the students do not write well. The language teachers down the line are inevitably put on the mat. The math teachers choose not to do anything about the desired language skills among their students. Language indeed is the prime vehicle of communication. It is indispensable for achieving sound numeracy and further learning of any other subject.

An immediate arrangement for a readingwriting program is the need of the moment. It should be offered by any teacher, including the math teacher! The onus is on primary teachers to facilitate the learning of basic literacy and numeracy for all students. All teachers must be thus equipped.

Attaining Literacy and Numeracy

Reading is not just letters and words, it is more than that. Words are learnt in contexts. Specific contexts like market, food, forest – or even a story – provide an array of words uniquely specific to it. New words, put together in meaningful sentences and paragraphs, are learnt in association, retained, and then internalized. These are further used in different situations and become reinforced through usage.

Math is no exception. It is not just numbers; it is more than that. The use of numbers, like words, is learnt in contexts such as ‘more,’ ‘less,’ ‘multiplying,’ and ‘distribution’. Each word denotes a different concept and a different process for manipulating numbers. The operations and words used in association with them are learnt in given contexts. The ‘math words’ or ‘terms’ are successfully added to the learner’s vocabulary. Math, in a sense, is just another language!

Building Interconnections for Better Literacy and Numeracy

“Sums are nothing but little stories to be solved.”
I remember a teacher repeating this in the language classes. Sums can be narrated as stories, discussed, and computed together in the language class.
Known words, learnt in the language class, can be used to build word sums to ensure better comprehension, computation, fewer spelling errors, and more confidence.
Students can be given a free hand in creating their own sums using their vocabulary and experiences in order to add to the class pool of sums for practice.
Common worksheets that highlight similar patterns of math and language exercises encourage logical thinking.
Write a story in 3 lines using the given words: night/sky

Make sums using the given numbers: 2, 3

____________________ ____________________

____________________ ____________________

Complete the following exercises:

Complete the following exercises:

Combining numeracy and literacy skills can also be an interesting venture.
Use the numbers 3, 6, 9 to build a story.

Are children able to read the terms and compute without having symbols provided?
Read the instructions and compute:

Students could be asked to write out the instructions for these sums:
a. 45 + 35
b. 90 ÷ 15 – 6

Reading and Mathematical Literacy

Reading provides both context and motivation for students of mathematics (David Whitin, Heidi Mills, and Timothy O’Keefe). Different kinds of texts, including stories, serve as catalysts. The context of a story stimulates the learners (including the teachers) to think in new and diverse ways. As they feel encouraged to apply the different numerical skills that they already know, the context might also initiate learning of a new mathematical skill!

Exploring further, students can spontaneously move into the realms of Environmental and Social Studies and also navigate the possibilities of the performing and visual arts.

To illustrate the influence of reading on mathematical skills, let us look at the story, ‘The Sky and the Earth’ with the appropriate worksheets.

As students read and discuss ‘The Sky and the Earth,’ they are to apply the skill of categorization in worksheet B1.

The next two worksheets help students to hone their skills in the sequencing of events (B2) and sharpen their ability to make comparisons by working on a Venn Diagram (C).

Next they are to solve simple numerical problems using the worksheets below.

It is the interconnected learning that matters finally. Proficiency in literacy and numeracy prospers through the process of interconnection – as do all the other school subjects.

It was a time of crisis when, at Shikshamitra school, we were left with only two teachers and a teaching assistant to teach the whole group of students, ranging from beginners to those in the 6th level (8-13 year olds). We had no other choice but to create an integrated plan of teaching and learning, borrowing from David Horsborough’s pedagogy.

A different kind of time table was drawn up with each learning session ranging between one-and-a-half to two hours, allowing us to cover languages, music, art and craft, various concepts in mathematics, EVS and social studies – under a single theme. All the students sat in a single room, using the library and computer spaces as and when required. This way, we economized a lot on time and space, and learnt to weave the subjects meaningfully. Much more learning was possible than what could be done in standard classes of 45 minutes each.

It was, however, mandatory that we teachers did our homework together. Each of us were going through and discussing all the subjects, then preparing self-study materials and appropriate worksheets for every learning level (for both individuals and groups), including for those who had learning difficulties. The assessment of different learning outcomes was often based around one single story.

We tried this for six months, pleasantly surprised to find that we were actually all experiencing a boost in learning standards – of both students and teachers – in the ability to learn independently and to appreciate the value of interdependence (between subjects and humans) in a learning space.

We make the most of what we learn when we discover the connection between the different areas of learning and how they can be a part of our everyday life. This is why we need to be vigilant, always keeping in mind that it is up to the learner to choose to learn and to make the final connections.

Acknowledgement: The author would like to acknowledge her colleagues Biswajit Chitrakar and Maura Hurley for their help and support in writing this article.