Disciplinary literacy for GCSE and A level
Disciplinary literacy
Genre
Corpus
For teachers
Genre, corpus and disciplinary literacy
What is disciplinary literacy?
Each subject has its own tools, structures and language. Disciplinary literacy teaches those explicitly rather than leaving students to infer them.
What is genre?
Categories of text shaped by audience and purpose, each calling for different themes, structures and language.
What is corpus?
A collection of authentic texts, gathered to show how language is really used.
What do teachers say about it?
[Students] not only produce texts independently in the focused genre by the end of this cycle but they’re also given the tools to assess what they’ve done so they can be self-critical.
[Students] have got more understanding of what each part of the sentence, the clause, functions to do. We are talking about the purpose of the language, and trying to structure that academic language.
Teaching [language] explicitly really brings [students] to the level that you would like them to, without making any blocks to your current practice. It doesn’t slow the lesson down.
Authentic student writing from real classrooms
The BAWESS corpus brings together authentic written work by secondary school students, so that teachers and researchers can see how academic language is actually used across subjects — and teach it explicitly.