Encouraging Literacy in Mathematics Teaching and Learning: Junior High School Teachers' Perspectives

摘要

School literacy program (SLP) tries to nurture the attitude of noble character to children through reading activities, since such activities are believed to become a reflective, analytical, and critical skill leading to the development of other disciplines including mathematics. Consequently program literacy needs to be applied in classroom learning by mathematics teachers. Thus, the aims of this study is to explore teachers' perspectives toward the management of learning and teaching mathematics by involving literacy activities. Fifty-eight mathematics teachers at junior high school were invited to fill out a set of questionnaire consisting of 14 items related to literacy activities in teaching and learning mathematics. The teachers' responses on this set of items were then analyzed by studying the tendency of whether they get used to carry out the examined activities by the items or not based on each item frequency. Generally, results indicate that all the literacy activities within the set of items have already been carried out by teachers, although not all teachers have implement it in their teaching practices. All teachers admitted to have 15-minutes habituation of reading, ask students to pose questions which relates various learning resources being read. This situation picturing potential activities to develop teachers' professionalism in improving literacy.