Disciplinary Literacy in the Primary Language Curriculum
Section 6, The Primary Language Curriculum in Practice, details disciplinary literacy as "Teaching language and literacy throughout the curriculum, in a manner that supports thinking and learning in different subjects". This e-bulletin will explore the main concepts behind disciplinary literacy.
What is Disciplinary Literacy?
Disciplinary literacy refers to the idea that we should teach the specialised ways of reading, understanding, and thinking used in each academic discipline, such as science, history, or literature. Each field has its own ways of using text to create and communicate meaning. Accordingly, as children advance through school, literacy instruction should shift from general literacy strategies to the more specific or specialised ones from each discipline. (Shanahan & Shanahan 2014)
How does it relate to integration?
Disciplinary Literacy is integration, but integration in a way that foregrounds key skills/ideas in the other subjects. Where literacy is put to use in service of the other subject (rather than the other way around).
Integration gives children’s learning a broader and richer perspective, emphasises the interconnectedness of knowledge and ideas and reinforces the learning process’ (Introduction to the Primary Curriculum ‘99, pg 24)
Disciplinary Literacy is / isn't
Thinking about Literacy Skills across the Disciplines
Practitioners of different disciplines read, write and think differently. It is important that children can transfer their skills from Literacy to other areas of the curriculum.
The table on the left can act as a starting point through which we can begin to think about embedding literacy skills in history. The original and entire table, including other disciplines, is available on the link below.
The Learning Outcomes from the PLC help us consider the Literacy skills children will need to engage in activities as a scientist, artist, musician and geographer etc. The following link suggests some Literacy skills children can apply across the curriculum.
When preparing for teaching and learning across literacy and another subject area, it is important to be familiar with both curricular areas. The buttons below give an overview of the strands, skills and concepts across the curriculum to support preparation for disciplinary literacy.
In the following videos we see how a teacher teaches her students to read, to write and to think like historians while exploring the classes inquiries about the moon landings.
When reading in other disciplines it is important that the children have access to number of different texts on the topic, that they can purposely engage wearing the hat of the the discipline. In this case the children are examining three different sources as historians.
The teacher provides the children opportunities to make choices about what they will read and what they will write about. The writing aspect of this work is built into the regular classroom routine of the writers workshop. Here we see the teacher teaching children how to cite sources in thier writing, while making use of the POW and TREE frameworks (Harris et al, 2002)
Applying Literacy Skills across the Curriculum
Vocabulary Across the Disciplines
Subject specific vocabulary in oral language: Children need to be explicitly taught subject specific vocabulary in order to fully engage as a practitioner of the discipline.
Most curricular areas have glossaries for their subject-specific vocabulary like the example above for Geography. They can be accessed at the link below.
Word Parts in reading: Awareness of the morphology of words (example word roots), allows children to make an attempt at the meaning of words. Eg. macro / micro
Various contexts in writing: Some words have ‘everyday’ meanings and pupils have a range of associations with them, for example tissue has an everyday meaning but a specific scientific meaning. Another example is if we take the word ‘cell’ and its use in mathematics vs. its use in science.
More information on developing Vocabulary can be found in the eBulletins linked below.
Planning a Lesson
When engaging with disciplinary literacy, it is useful to find an interesting question for the children to use their literacy skills and the skills of the discipline to explore. The infographics below give an outline of how this might happen in practice.
The following exemplars provide a framework of questions to consider to help to prepare to engage with disciplinary literacy. It is important to consider;
- The question or inquiry in the discipline which is will motivate the learners
- What skills or concepts will be developed in the discipline
- What literacy skills will be developed
- What texts are available to support inquiry into the topic
- What vocabulary will the learners need to engage with the discipline
Credits:
Created with images by Pixel-Shot - "Backpack with school supplies on wooden table against color background" • patpitchaya - "Wood English Letters Box Set" • Ben White - "untitled image"