Literacy for Humanities
This three hour workshop has been designed to help teachers in Key Stage 3 meet the literacy demands of the humanities subjects. There is a focus on the role of vocabulary and academic language, and the journey from informal speech to formal writing.
About the course
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Identify research-based approaches to developing literacy in the humanities
Explore what we mean by literacy in humanities and consider what literacy skills students need. Compile a toolkit of tried and tested strategies.
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Understand the roles of vocabulary acquisition and academic language
Recognise typical language features of written texts such as nominalisation, discourse markers and the passive voice.
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Understand the journey from informal talk to formal writing
Show students how to transform writing to a more formal style using language features and nominalisation.
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Explore reading strategies for engaging with challenging texts
Be able to model and deconstruct typical text types using active reading strategies and reciprocal reading.
Workshop structure
Introduction: objectives and outcomes of the training
- What do we mean by humanities subjects?
What is academic language ?
- How does academic language differ from everyday and exploratory talk?
- The academic register in history, geography and religious studies
- Text types, audience and purpose
Modelling and deconstructing humanities texts
- Identify relevant language features at sentence and text level
- Use exam questions to explore command words and appropriate discourse markers
Practical applications for use in lessons
- Direct vocabulary acquisition
- Reading multimodal texts
- Oracy strategies for exploratory talk
Training availability
Owing to the ongoing situation with COVID-19, delivery of face-to-face training has been suspended. Please explore our online training opportunities. If you have a specific query about our face-to-face course email Marlene Vasquez-Cain.