Reconciling the terrible twins: investigating the relationship of literacy and numeracy in primary classrooms

Literacy and numeracy are frequently found bound together in educational policies, statements, and manifestos. They are certainly perceived as the most important of subjects in primary school classrooms, claiming the lion's share of the teaching and learning time and being the focus of much testing, standardized and otherwise. While historically, many numeracy practices in ancient times led literacy practices, the twentieth century focus was heavily biased in favour of developing literacy practices with a somewhat secondary focus on numeracy. It appears that currently, the rapid and continual onslaught of information has created a situation in which numeracy has been hailed as the literacy for the 21st century, with an emphasis on critical numeracy skills for social justice, democracy, and global citizenship. This paper suggests a perspective which places considerable value on investigating the ways in which these two currently separate symbol systems can be explored as joint study in primary classrooms in ways in which critical thinking as cognitive capacities can be enhanced. This exploration takes as established the literacy components of numeracy competencies and instead promotes the numeracy components of literacy development using a frame work of analysing text at micro, meso, and macro levels. This framework considers the interpolated aspects of structure, sequence and sense that dominate English literacy practices and further extrapolate these and identify the critical mathematical concepts upon which these are based. Strategies for developing critical thinking skills which include authentically engaging with both symbol systems simultaneously are suggested.