Strategy 8: Text Reformulation

This strategy involves taking a text, such as a textbook, article, or novel, and reformulating it into a different type of text, such as a short story, poem, play, diary, etc. for the sake of developing a greater meaning of the original work. Beers offers many templates for text reformulation, including Fortunately-Unfortunately stories and If-Then stories. By reformulation, students will analyze the author’s intent, reread passages for meaning, form opinions, and support those opinions.

In mathematics, we reformulate text into symbols, or vice versa. Words like and, plus, together, and total can all be indicated by the symbol +, while symbols such as < and > can be read as “less than” and “greater than”, respectively. By teaching students to write the mathematical symbol directly over the written words, the student begins to see that once long and confusing math problem as simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Another reformulation of text can take place on a number line. For example, the following question is from the North Carolina’s released EOG test questions from 2003:

Which statement is true?

A 2 > -2

B 2 < -4

C -2 < -4

D -4 > 4

This problem has lots of symbols and lots of numbers that may be confusing. However, if the students transfer the number onto a number line, and write the words “less than” or “greater than”, the answer (which is choice A) becomes much clearer.