Disciplinary Literacy & British Academic Written English Secondary School (BAWESS) Corpus

This funding will support finalising and submitting an ESRC open call proposal. The proposed project addresses the epistemic injustice that is caused by the barriers of accessing the curriculum through language. As pointed out by Quigley and Coleman (2019: 2), ‘young people who leave school without good literacy skills are held back at every stage of life’. The project aims to gain insights and develop resources to advance teachers’ and learners’ knowledge of how to write and read disciplinary texts; and address the language barrier advancing the SDG 4.1 of ‘equitable and quality’ education and access to the curriculum for all. The specific expected outcomes of the proposed study are: 1) The development of the first of its kind multidisciplinary British Academic Written English Secondary School (BAWESS) corpus, which will be a large multidisciplinary dataset of iGCSE, GCSE, A Level and IB exam practice texts with tremendous research potential to study the development of disciplinary literacy. 2) The proposed study will contribute to pedagogy by identifying effective models and resources for a disciplinary literacy approach and corpus-pedagogy in secondary school curricula. 3) Ultimately, at a theoretical level the intended study will contribute to a better understanding of the language features of effective exam texts and thus advance the field of disciplinary literacy and language education across the curriculum.