Promoting Literacy: Giving Students The Tools For Future Success

 By Donna Boam

“To be literate is to gain a voice and to participate meaningfully and assertively in decisions that affect one’s life.”

This quote, from the academic Yusuf Kassam in 1994, highlights the importance of ensuring that the children we teach are literate and have the skills and tools that they need to succeed in their lives, beyond our classroom. It has long been agreed that all teachers in a school have responsibility for the teaching of literacy; even 100 years ago it was argued that “Every teacher is a teacher of English because every teacher is a teacher in English” (Sampson, 1922). Yet in the competing demands of a school day, this explicit teaching of literacy skills can easily be pushed to one side. What are we to do? In 2019, the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) released their report, ‘Improving Literacy In Secondary Schools.’ This included 7 recommendations, namely:

1. Prioritise ​‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum
2. Provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject
3. Develop students’ ability to read complex academic texts
4. Break down complex writing tasks
5. Combine writing instruction with reading in every subject
6. Provide opportunities for structured talk
7. Provide high-quality literacy interventions for struggling students

So, which of these are you doing at present? As a school, there are some things that we are doing really well. In my lesson drop-ins, I regularly see scaffolds being given to support writing across all subjects (Recommendation 4). I regularly see students being asked to read something, to help support their own knowledge and their own writing (Recommendation 5). And I also regularly see students being asked to discuss their thoughts (Recommendation 6), although this does need to be well structured and with clear success criteria, so that students are not just discussing what they are going to have for lunch that day! In improving literacy, the big focus for us as a school will be Recommendation 1, namely prioritising ​‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum. As I mentioned earlier, part of our February INSET will feature a workshop from the National Literacy Trust, focussing explicitly on this. But in the meantime… What is disciplinary literacy?

Disciplinary literacy refers to the specifics of reading, writing, and communicating in a discipline or subject area.

It helps students understand how language works in different subject areas and supports their understanding of how vocabulary is used, how question phrasing will shape the answer expected, and how to interpret the written and graphic materials used for learning.

Considering it another way, each discipline has a specialized vocabulary and components that are unique to that discipline and secondary students need to be taught what is unique about each discipline. For example, when we ask our Year 11 students to evaluate a text in their English lessons, and when we then ask them to evaluate an experiment from their Science lesson, what is required here from the students has some subject-specific nuances involved. So today, consider: What are the things that I do to help improve my students’ literacy each day? How do I teach key, subject-specific, vocabulary? What could I do better? What are some of Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary that my students need to know? How do I know that they know these and can apply these in a sentence, or in a paragraph, successfully? Further reading:

• https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/best-practice/every-teacher-is-a-teacher-of-literacy-teaching-literacy-across-the-curriculum-part-1/
• https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/literacy-ks3-ks4
• https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-what-do-we-mean-by-disciplinary-literacy
• https://learningspy.co.uk/literacy/closing-language-gap-building-vocabulary/#:~:text=Vocabulary%20can%20be%20usefully%20divided,(osmosis%2C%20trigonometry%2C%20onomatopoeia)