Chloe Butlin, our literacy content specialist, introduces the disciplinary literacy tree: a new EEF resource to support teachers and leaders to implement disciplinary literacy in their settings.
The analogy of the disciplinary literacy tree illustrates the relationship between general and subject specific literacy skills.
As children move to secondary school, the more defined branches mark the fact that literacy and text become what we describe in the guidance report as ‘increasingly specialised’ across the disciplines of curriculum domains. The foundations, or roots, for this are grounded firmly in the literacy learning that comes before.
For students to effectively access these domains, they need this expertise to be unlocked deliberately and explicitly. So disciplinary literacy is an important area of professional knowledge for every teacher.
