
Understanding Literacy for GCSEs: Teaching disciplinary literacy

The reformed GCSEs place greater demands on students' literacy skills in each subject. This workshop helps secondary school teachers to develop themselves as literacy experts to improve students’ literacy in their subject areas.
About the workshop
In line with recommendations from the EEF's Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools, this one-day workshop supports teachers to prioritise and to teach ‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum.
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Develop strategies for improving reading comprehension and extended writing in curriculum areas
Explore reciprocal reading and the Directed Activities Related to Texts (DARTS) approach. Examine approaches to teaching writing, modelling specific language features for improved writing - including discourse markers, the passive voice and nominalisation.
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Learn to highlight specific language features and identify appropriate academic register
Transform informal, speech-like writing into a more formal written style so students can write like subject experts. Examine 'dictogloss' as a strategy to include nominalisation in formal writing.
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Annotate and explain a piece of GCSE writing to highlight typical language features
Identify audience and purpose for different text types, recognising command words as indicators of specific writing conventions. Explore subject-specific language features, including tier 2 vocabulary that helps make students writing more coherent and cohesive.
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Understand how to analyse the literacy demands of your own subject
Examine mark schemes from different subjects to identify assessment objectives. Identify key types of writing required. Develop the ability to write and model an extended GCSE answer for individual subjects.

Workshop structure and pricing
Structure
The workshop takes place over one day.
- Explore the research on academic language in education
- Understand the literacy demands of curriculum subjects
- From talk to writing: understanding the register continuum
- Learn strategies for improving talking and writing in an academic style
- Plan for implementing these strategies and activities back in your school
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.
Resources related to cross-curricular literacy
Consider becoming a member of the National Literacy Trust to access our full library of downloadable resources and evaluation tools.
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Mark the Bard!
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Landscape and literacy: linking geography and poetry at Key Stage 3
This resource explores the opportunities for links between literacy and landscape. It includes a sample geography and poetry lesson plan.