Facilitates Students Communicating With One Another in The Language of Mathematics

Using oral and written communication as a tool helps students reflect upon their understandings of mathematics, make connections within and outside of mathematics, and personalize math concepts. Buschman (1995) explains: "As soon as students use words to describe their thinking, they make their understanding more precise and more general at the same time. Only by using words in many situations and many contexts do students come to understand the full meaning of each word."

To illustrate the many ways that students communicate in mathematics, Mazie Jenkins and Johnny Lott (1995) quote Jacob, a Wisconsin third grader, as he describes communication in his class:

"We communicate by sharing at the end of math class. We share our strategy by drawing, and using math manipulatives to show the way we did it. We learn the way the sharer did it by asking questions. We talk to other students about their strategy and how they got the answer ....We talk about the problem with the teacher and she asks questions about how we did it. So we can think more about the problem and how we did it. To the teacher the answer isn't as important as how we solved the problem. We also write in our math journals so the teacher can learn how we did the problem and so the kids can think about how they solved the problem."

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