Disciplinary Literacy

Alongside our vision to support all students to enjoy reading, we also recognise the importance of building disciplinary literacy: skills relevant to reading, writing and oracy relevant to each subject.

The EEF recognises the value of supporting students to become literate within each subject. At St. Bernard’s we are committed to building disciplinary literacy using the following tools:

Reciprocal Reading: Staff are trained to explicitly teach the reading of texts by pre-teaching vocabulary and using the reciprocal reading prompts of Prediction, Clarification, Question, Summary.

Pre-teaching vocabulary: At the start of each lesson, staff pre-teach tier 2 or 3 vocabulary relevant to the lesson. This allows students to understand unfamiliar words that will enable them to learn. Reading always starts with the teacher checking students’ familiarity with all vocabulary across tier 1 to 3.

Literacy Mats: Each subject has a literacy mat which is designed to provide guidance in the accurate use of punctuation, grammar and key words within that subject. It also includes top tips for success and sentence starters. Each Year 7 classroom has these literacy mats available to support success in writing within that subject. To see these literacy mats, please visit the Curriculum page and select the subject.

Retrieval Practice: Each lesson at St. Bernard’s begins with retrieval practice. Students are given a range of questions to prompt their memory, and this activation of prior knowledge also improves comprehension. A short selection of tier 2 and 3 key words are also explicitly taught at the start of each lesson.

Modelling: As part of our Teaching and Learning policy, students are routinely shown how to structure writing. This includes scaffolding (writing frames, sentence starters) and modelling, where the teacher demonstrates effective writing skills as part of the teaching process.

Oracy: As part of our Teaching and Learning policy, teachers also model ‘speaking like an expert’, which is a method of modelling high quality talk using key vocabulary and developed answers. Students are routinely encouraged to ‘speak like an expert’ in the classroom by using full sentences, including key tier 3 words. Students are also given opportunities across the curriculum to participate in oracy events that will help shape their fluency and confidence in the subject.