Disciplinary Literacy & Corpus-Based Pedagogy: The BAWESS (British Academic Written English Secondary School) Corpus

“Young people who leave school without good literacy skills
are held back at every stage of life”
(Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), 2019:2)

The EEF adds that Literacy skills are essential for achievement and successful outcomes for all learners, and the Government emphasise that ‘it is particularly important to induct pupils into the language which de fines each subject’ (Department for Education (DfE), 2014:11). The language of a subject, i.e., ‘disciplinary literacy’ is de ned as “learning how to read, think about, write, communicate, and use information like each discipline’s experts” (Zygouris-Coe, 2012: 36). Not having command of disciplinary literacy is an entrenched problem leading to under-achievement of learners from low socio-economic and English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners (Hall & Wicaksono, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated the educational attainment gap among disadvantaged children, it is a “slow motion catastrophe... [that] will continue to have far-reaching consequences for an entire generation” (The Public Accounts Committee, 2023).

Language is central to education, and academic language is often challenging for learners regardless of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In teaching and learning language serves as the primary tool for accessing, communicating, and evaluating knowledge. Success in English-language high-stake external exams (GCSE, iGCSE, A Level and IB, henceforth exam) is predominantly based on written responses and the outcome is crucial for higher education and future careers. It's argued that ‘by attending to the literacy demands of their subjects, teachers increase their students’ chance of success in their subjects’ (EEF, 2019:2). Literacy is key for all learners in the UK and the growing number of learners studying through English as the Medium Education (EME) at international schools around the world.
However, no research is available that systematically characterises disciplinary literacy patterns in students' writing during secondary school exam years (iGCSE/GCSE/A Level/IB) or describes the development of disciplinary writing during the transition from iGCSE/GCSE to A Level/IB. This study will create a corpus of student writing and will analyse literacy and writing development during the secondary school exam years. The study will reveal language patterns that characterise student writing across various educational stages and disciplines.

Our comprehensive investigation of language development during the exam years adopts a trinocular perspective, examining language from (Halliday 1996, Matthiessen 2020):
Above - the types of texts that students have to write, considering genres as a ‘staged goal-oriented purposeful activity that people engage in as members of their culture’ (Martin, 1984:25).
Around - how disciplinary texts are organised and the relationship between different sections of a text.
Below the lexico-grammatical features found in these texts.

To achieve this, we draw on the power of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to provide an empirically grounded rationale for language development and the role of language in construing and representing disciplinary knowledge. Our findings will offer unique insights into disciplinary language usage and development, with the potential for significant educational and scientific impact by:
1. Establishing the inaugural corpus and empirical study of language development across the exam years.
2. Uncovering the grammatical and disciplinary literacy patterns in student writing during this period.
3. Creating a publicly accessible online resource based on authentic student writing, enabling users to explore disciplinary literacy, language development, and various teaching and learning aspects.
4. Informing and supporting national and international research, curriculum policies, and teacher education.

“Young people who leave school without good literacy skills are held back at every stage of life” (Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), 2019:2)

Students at secondary school often find writing demands to be very challenging. The challenges they face are particularly prominent when writing for standardised high-stake exams such as the iGCSE/GCSE, A Level and the International Baccalaureate (IB) (henceforth, writing in the exam years). Academic language is demanding for all learners regardless of their cultural and linguistic background, and is ‘never anyone's mother tongue’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 115). Language is the primary resource for making meaning and the main way of assessing writing in the exam years, and is not expected to be the same across disciplines. Accessing ways of knowing and understanding in a specific discipline, then translating this into the language assessed in school exams relies on first being able to read and write in the language of that discipline, often referred to as disciplinary literacy. At times, students may display the knowledge and understanding of a subject area, but then fall short when writing in an exam. Their inability to properly reflect their content-knowledge through discipline-appropriate language may translate into under-achievement and eventually limit their future opportunities for progression.

Subject teachers may encounter similar hurdles. While they are extremely familiar with the knowledge required to teach their discipline, some teachers would benefit from a more in depth understanding of the disciplinarily literacy requirements needed to talk and write like a biologist, or a geographer, historian, etc. Supporting disciplinary literacy requires teachers to understand both the content inherently important to a discipline and how to express it in a way that resembles discipline-specific writing expectations. Explicitly teaching writing for curriculum learning has huge benefits for learners (Forey 2020; Forey & Cheung 2019).

The present study aims investigate the role of language in representing knowledge in different disciplines. We will examine language adopting a trinocular perspective (Halliday, 1996; Matthiessen, 2020), by analysing the language patterns from:

- above, examining the genres of texts students are required to write. Genre is defined as a ‘staged goal-oriented purposeful activity that people engage in as members of their culture’ (Martin, 1984:25).
- around the structure and the relationships between sections, paragraphs, relationships in a text.
- below, analysing the lexical and grammatical choices (lexico-grammar) that are found in different texts and disciplines.

The result of this multifaceted analysis will provide unique and systematic insights into the patterns, structures and language choices of effective writing in the exam years in different disciplines.

We plan to develop the first discipline-specific corpus of student written texts in the exam years. A corpus is a large body of digital texts. This corpus will be shared as a publicly accessible online resources that enables users (teachers, students, researchers and the public) to explore disciplinary literacy, language development and various teaching and learning aspects of writing. Working closely with teachers we aim to co-create resources that support teaching and learning. The BAWESS Project will lead to an improvement in the teaching and learning of disciplinary literacy, enhancing writing and access to the curriculum in schools.