Developing disciplinary literacy at your school

Empowering schools for academic excellence

Welcome to Bedrock Learning’s Disciplinary Literacy Hub, your go-to resource for enhancing literacy across every subject in schools. Discover how a strong disciplinary literacy strategy can transform teaching and learning outcomes, and explore the tools to help your school achieve excellence.

Get started with your disciplinary literacy resource packs

We've created a bank of subject-specific resources to support you in implementing a disciplinary literacy strategy.

What is disciplinary literacy?

Literacy is fundamental to academic success and future achievements, influencing all areas of secondary education. Disciplinary literacy enhances literacy by focusing on the unique demands of each subject. Rather than treating literacy as a generic skill, it acknowledges that each subject has its own unique language, texts, and methods of communication.

The Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) advises that schools should be ‘prioritising disciplinary literacy across the curriculum’ and that teachers should provide explicit vocabulary instruction in every subject, especially for Tier 3 words that learners are unlikely to encounter in everyday use.

Disciplinary literacy ensures that learners are equipped to navigate and master the complexities of each subject area—from reading historical texts with an eye for bias to decoding mathematical graphs and equations.

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What are the benefits of disciplinary literacy?

By integrating literacy within each discipline, learners build deep content knowledge and develop the ability to think and communicate like subject experts. Research shows that targeted vocabulary instruction and subject-specific reading strategies improve comprehension and enhance subject knowledge, critical thinking, and exam performance. Studies like Orman’s 2021 research on science vocabulary indicate that disciplinary literacy strategies can significantly boost learner outcomes.

A disciplinary literacy approach:

Enhances learner comprehension and deepens subject knowledge.
Equips learners with the specialist vocabulary to understand and communicate in specific-subject areas.
Fosters critical thinking and expertise in each subject, reinforcing meta-cognitive skills.
Demonstrated to boost exam performance (Orman, 2021).

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What does a good disciplinary literacy strategy look like?

A successful disciplinary literacy strategy is multifaceted and deeply embedded within the curriculum. Key components include:

Targeted vocabulary instruction: Focus on Tier 3 vocabulary, ensuring learners are directly taught subject-specific terms and can apply them in context.

Reading strategies: Teach learners how to approach different types of texts within each subject, whether analysing historical sources or interpreting data in science.

Writing skills: Encourage discipline-specific writing practices, guiding learners to structure their work according to the norms of each subject area.

Contextualised: All vocabulary is taught through a wide-range of authentic texts to give learners multiple opportunities to encounter a word and remember it.

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Where should schools start?

Implementing a successful disciplinary literacy strategy begins with a whole-school approach:

1. Assess current practices: Review how literacy is currently integrated into each subject and identify gaps or areas for improvement.

2. Professional development: Equip teachers with the knowledge and tools to incorporate disciplinary literacy into their teaching. This could include training on vocabulary instruction, reading strategies, and how to reduce cognitive load.

3. Resource alignment: Use subject-specific resources to align your curriculum with disciplinary literacy goals. Ensure that materials are accessible and support the development of subject-specific skills from KS3 to KS5.

Bedrock Mapper makes targeted and personalised subject-specific vocabulary instruction easy. It enables schools to access every subject’s key word list in one place, with over 40,000 words taught using a research-based learning sequence.

A graphic showing topics on Bedrock Mapper

What can a head of department do to drive improvement?

Champion the cause: Advocate for the importance of disciplinary literacy and ensure it is a priority in departmental planning and assessment.

Collaborate with peers: Work with other departments to share best practices and develop cross-curricular literacy initiatives.

Support teachers: Provide ongoing support and resources to help teachers integrate literacy into their lessons. This could include access to subject-specific literacy packs, such as the disciplinary literacy maths resource pack.

Monitor progress: Regularly review learner outcomes to assess the impact of literacy strategies and make adjustments as needed.

Create a coherent strategy: Develop a clear, cohesive approach to disciplinary literacy across your department.