Research School Network: Demystifying Disciplinary Reading Learn how subject‑specific reading and vocabulary instruction help students think critically in every discipline.

Improving disciplinary reading is fundamental to helping students access, understand, and think critically within every subject they study. According to the Education Endowment Foundation’s Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools Guidance Report, literacy is at the heart of learning across the curriculum, and reading, when taught in discipline specific ways, enables students to engage more deeply with subject knowledge.

While generic reading strategies have value, the EEF stresses that successful secondary literacy requires recognising the distinct reading demands of each subject. This is the foundation of disciplinary literacy, an approach that supports students in learning to read like historians, scientists, mathematicians, or artists.

So how can we do this in practice?

1. Understand that reading is discipline-specific

This might sound obvious, but how often do we really take an external look at what differentiates our subject from every other?

The EEF guidance highlights that every subject has its own ways of using and interpreting texts. For example, scientists read to extract precise information, analyse data, and evaluate evidence, whereas historians read to question authorship, identify bias, and compare interpretations.

Teachers therefore need clarity on what it means to read like an expert in their subject. As we often comment, teachers must be able to articulate disciplinary expectations – such as ​“explain like a scientist” or ​“interpret like a historian” – to help students navigate complex subject texts. This clarity empowers students to understand not only what they are reading but how and why they should read it in specific ways.

2. Develop students’ ability to read complex texts

One of the EEF’s seven core recommendations which sticks with me is to help students develop the capacity to read demanding academic texts, because at its core, this is both simple and complex all at once. How do we actually help student read ​‘difficult’ things more successfully?

This could include modelling how experts approach complex materials, teaching strategies such as summarising, questioning, or annotating, and providing scaffolded opportunities for guided practice.

Because secondary texts often introduce unfamiliar structures, dense vocabulary, and abstract concepts, students benefit from explicit instruction in navigating them. This is particularly vital in subjects that rely heavily on technical language or multi-step reasoning.

3. Prioritise Vocabulary Instruction

Effective disciplinary reading relies on understanding both academic and domain specific vocabulary. The report recommends targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject, emphasising repeated exposure and opportunities to apply new terms in context.

Here at Shotton Hall, we focus heavily on the teaching of morphology and etymology. With curriculum time being limited, we won’t have the time to teach every word we may want to. But in teaching the morphology of words, this can unlock students’ understanding of vocabulary.

Explicitly teaching morphology is a high-leverage strategy that can help pupils break down unfamiliar words, thus supporting word recognition and reading comprehension. Pupils need to learn the meaning of many words; it’s also vital that they learn relationships between words and subtleties of meaning. When considering vocabulary breadth and depth, respectively, an awareness of morphology helps both. A wealth of evidence suggests that depth might actually be more important than breadth.

Because morphemes have their own distinct meaning, teaching morphology can open up patterns between words: these patterns support pupils to build rigorous, connected schema around the language they encounter. It supports pupils to develop rich, networked vocabulary knowledge.

Disciplinary reading isn’t just about harder texts; it’s about smarter support. When we unlock how experts read, we unlock how students learn. So let’s keep opening those doors.