Research School Network: Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools: How is your Subject Unique? Exploring Disciplinary Literacy in the Latest EEF Guidance Report

Have you read Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools? It follows on from previous EEF guidance reports on Early Literacy, Literacy at KS1 and Literacy at KS2. While it is a great guide for those responsible for whole-school literacy, it offers a great deal for the subject leader or subject teacher. That’s because one key idea that runs through the report is that of ​‘disciplinary literacy’.

Literacy skills can be general e.g. using root words to identify meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary but also subject specific, because each area of the curriculum has its own vocabulary and ways of communicating. This focus on subject specific strategies is what we mean by disciplinary literacy.

Recommendation 1 of the guidance – Prioritise ​‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum – offers some clear examples of what this looks like, and suggests some questions for you to consider in your teams:

• What is unique about your subject discipline in terms of reading, writing, speaking and listening?
• What is common with other subject disciplines? 
• How do members of this subject discipline use language on a daily basis?
• Are there any typical literacy misconceptions held by students, for example, how to write an effective science report?
• Are there words and phrases used typically, or uniquely, in the subject discipline?

Reading in your subject – how is it unique?
There are some generic reading strategies, often explicitly taught in English lessons, that can be applied in all lessons: Activating prior knowledge; prediction; questioning; clarifying; summarising.

But each of these look differently in every subject, because the nature of the texts and the purposes of reading are different. For example, a reader in English or History may be asked to consider the authorial perspectives and biases in texts, whereas a text in Science might be approached less critically. So, the history department might adapt some of these strategies and explicitly teach them. The examples given in the report are Sourcing – evaluating the source itself, Contextualising – placing the source in its social, political and cultural context, and Corroborating – comparing various sources and building a picture of how they work together.

Writing in your subject – how is it unique?

Writing is cognitively demanding. The Simple View of Writing (Berninger et al, 2002) suggests three elements which combine to make it difficult. Text generation- coming up with what is written; Transcription- handwriting and spelling; Executive Functioning- attention, self-regulation, planning, revising. And everything needs to be taught.

While we can assume that some elements of writing are explicitly taught in English lessons, we cannot assume that everything is transferrable. A plan to describe a fairground in GCSE English Language is not the same as a plan to describe how the set was used to communicate meaning in the production of a play in GCSE drama. In these cases, ​‘describe’, means something different, and the plans must reflect this too.

Again, we should question what is unique about our subject and try to address that by explicitly teaching strategies to address it. Word-level, sentence-level and whole-text level instruction should be focused on, and in doing so, teachers can help pupils to build longer, higher-quality responses. For an example on how to teach sentence construction, see our article here.

Combing reading with writing can be an excellent way of supporting writing in your subject as it can help to elucidate the subject-specific writing elements and conventions. The guidance report provides suggestions for how this might be achieved:

• Writing before reading
• Using annotations
• Writing short summaries of texts
• Creating checklists of good writing features in the subject
• Anticipating common misconceptions e.g. by highlighting counterexamples in texts

So what does it look like in your subject? One great aspect from the guidance report is the series of ​‘vignettes’ of a school day, illustrating examples of teachers grappling with the ideas in your subject. We are keen to hear from teachers across Bradford who are doing the same. Please get in touch and share your examples!