Research School Network: Disciplinary literacy – putting the disciplines into the heart of literacy development I used to think that having common approaches to reading and writing across different subjects was a good thing.

I used to think it was helpful to devise resources and tools to support whole school literacy.

I used to think that having common approaches to reading and writing across different subjects was a good thing.

I was wrong – at least in part.

The problem with my beliefs, and the problem with the approach to developing literacy that many schools like mine adopt as a consequence, is that they are founded on the mistaken assumption that reading and writing look and mean the same thing in every subject. That the way you read in English is the same as the way you read in maths; that the way you write in science lessons is the same as the way you write in history lessons.

This is not really the case.

Whilst there are some useful transferable literacy skills, every discipline has its own unique ways of using language. It is understanding what is different about the specific reading and writing demands in a subject that really matters and is ultimately what makes the most difference to how students learn. At secondary school, students need to learn the content of the disciplines, but they also need to learn their disciplinary practices and languages too.

This is why disciplinary literacy is so important, and why it is the one of seven recommendations for improving literacy in secondary schools in the recent EEF guidance. Out of the seven recommendations for literacy leaders to consider, prioritising disciplinary literary across the curriculum is the first and underpins several of the other recommendations that come later on.

Disciplinary literacy is more than just establishing a few principles of good literacy teaching and applying them to different subjects. Rather, disciplinary literacy recognises what is unique about the literacy demands of each subject, and how each subject understands and represents itself through language differently. In this model, beyond a certain point in a child’s learning, generic approaches to improving reading and writing should give way to approaches rooted in the disciplines.

What matters therefore is understanding what it means to write like a scientist or a historian, or to know how read like a mathematician or a geographer. There are significant differences between these skills and our job is to get students to appreciate these nuances and help them learn how to think and express themselves in these specialised ways.

This emphasis on literary discipline specificity is both exciting and daunting. It’s exciting because it represents the chance for us as subject experts to help our students love and understand what we love and understand about our subjects – what makes them unique in terms of the knowledge they contain but also how that knowledge is accumulated and represented in language.

But it’s also rather daunting. We haven’t always been encouraged to think about our subjects, and how we teach them, in this way – through both the content and the language in which that content is conveyed. We haven’t always been given the time necessary to build up our disciplinary expertise. Over-emphasis on specification requirements has distorted the way we think about disciplinary practice and communicate this to our students, with the temptation for shortcuts and quick wins.

The guidance report is a great starting point for school leaders with responsibility for improving standards of reading and writing. It gives seven clear recommendations, with lots of helpful guidance and case studies of what these recommendations might look like in different school contexts. The questions that accompany the recommendations, for instance, help literacy leaders consider where they need to prioritise and to anticipate potential challenges:

The Research Schools Network also runs three-day training programmes that help support schools with developing their own literacy programmes based on the relevant areas of the EEF report that relate to their school’s priority. They take a closer look at the evidence underpinning the recommendations and share ideas and tools about how the recommendations can be mobilised effectively. Perhaps the most important aspect of the training is the devising of an implementation plan, one that looks at the barriers to implementation and how to successfully overcome them.

If you would like to sign up for one of these programmes look at the Research Schools Website for details of local courses.