Costas Loizou

Supporting Mathematical Communication through Open-Access Resources

Abstract: For many students, the difficulty of studying mathematics lies not only in the technical concepts and procedures, but in the language used to communicate the subject. Students must interpret dense definitions, distinguish between everyday and technical meanings, and move flexibly between symbolic expressions and verbal explanations. This requires them to read technical texts efficiently, extract meaning from multimodal representations, and justify their reasoning in writing and speech, all of which are linguistic tasks in a mathematical setting. These demands can be especially challenging for students with English as an additional language, for direct entrants, and for those transitioning between different educational systems, but they affect the wider student body too. In this talk I will show that these linguistic demands are central to success in mathematics degrees, using examples from first-year teaching to illustrate how students who perform strongly in technical tasks can still be disadvantaged by unfamiliar terminology, subtle shifts in meaning between everyday and technical language, and the demands of explaining mathematical reasoning to others. To address these challenges, our project The Academic Language of Mathematics offers a freely available open-access web-book, funded by the University of Leeds Open Books Programme, that supports students studying mathematics in English through bilingual glossaries, discipline-specific reading and writing tasks, and co-created student materials suitable for both lectures and independent study. I will outline the design principles behind the book, share practical in-class activities that colleagues can adopt and adapt, and discuss how attending explicitly to mathematical language can strengthen teaching and assessment practice in mathematics education.