Author page: vfi20

Assessment Is Never Neutral Assessment is never a neutral act. It communicates what knowledge, language and ways of thinking are valued. For learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL), assessment is especially important because it influences placement, curriculum access and teacher expectations. Too often, early assessment underestimates the prior knowledge of newly arrived learners.…

“This was a blast – great people and meaningful work”. Ruslana Westerlund, Westerlund Consulting and Bethel University. June 17th and 18th saw the return of our annual Disciplinary Literacy Symposium to the University of Bath, and this year proved to be the biggest event so far, with 31 speakers giving talks and workshops on…

The Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC), discussed in last month’s blog, is specifically designed to enable students to develop their ability to comprehend and compose disciplinary genres, using dialogue as a key vehicle. It, therefore, incorporates and integrates reading, writing and oracy skills. The TLC, in Figure 1, (see April’s Blog) is used by teachers…

The phrase ‘I do, we do, you do’ has become commonplace in educational discourse. In the UK it is often used in school meetings, training sessions and policy documents when talking about how to scaffold students’ learning, and even a cursory exploration of school websites yields many explicit references to it. Here’s an example below,…

What is Data-Driven Learning (DDL)? Data-Driven Learning (DDL) has increasingly become a valuable approach in language and literacy education, offering students opportunities to discover patterns in authentic language use through the exploration of large collections of digital texts (i.e. corpora). Rather than being passive recipients of knowledge, learners actively interrogate real examples of language drawn…

The aims of the BAWESS project are nothing if not ambitious. With the help of our many fantastic participating schools, we are collecting thousands of examples of secondary school student writing, transcribing them into a digital database (‘The BAWESS Corpus’) of over one-million words in size. We will soon start analysing the data to find…

Every year, mock exams arrive like a tidal wave. Papers pile up, marking takes over your evenings, and the coffee machine becomes your closest colleague. It’s tempting to see mocks as just another assessment cycle to survive. But if you look closely, mock exam scripts offer some of the richest insights you’ll ever get into…

As a teacher, you know that mock exams are more than just a rehearsal; they’re a vital checkpoint for students preparing for high-stakes assessments. They provide insight into what our learners are good at and what they need to work on. But what if your mock exams could do even more? Get involved in…

Linguistics isn’t just about grammar rules; it’s a gateway to understanding how we think, communicate, and connect in the world we live in. Every year on November 26th, educators and language enthusiasts come together to celebrate National Linguistics Day – a day dedicated to the scientific study of language and its impact on human interaction,…

As the academic year gains momentum and with the renewed 2025 Ofsted Framework, it’s vital to keep disciplinary literacy at the forefront of classroom practice. Beyond general literacy, disciplinary literacy equips students with the tools to think, read, and write like subject experts. To support this, the BAWESS research team is offering a series of…

As the new academic year gets underway, it’s the perfect time for schools to renew their focus on disciplinary literacy, referring to the specialised ways of reading, writing, and thinking that are unique to each subject. In science, it might mean interpreting data and writing lab reports; in history, it typically involves evaluating historical sources…