The role of the BAWESS corpus, Disciplinary Literacy and Systemic Functional Linguistics in supporting and improving academic writing amongst EAL students

The writing demands of high-stakes secondary school exams are extremely challenging for many students, and EAL learners in particular. It has been noted that “Young people who leave school without good literacy skills are held back at every stage of life” (EEF, 2019: 2). The BAWESS Project is building a discipline-specific corpus of student exam-practice written texts collected from secondary schools in the UK, and English medium education (EME) international schools. We aim to develop a corpus of approximately one million words compiled from GCSE, iGCSE, A level and IB student written texts.
Some of the key questions the project addresses are: 
• What discipline-specific features are found in student writing within and between disciplines across the secondary school exam years?
• What is the nature of disciplinary variation of generic structures of exam responses in secondary school high-stakes exams?
• How can the findings be utilised to target areas for writing improvement across different student demographics, such as EAL students?
The project builds on work in language education, disciplinary literacy, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and corpus linguistics. In this presentation, we focus specifically on SFL and draw on authentic examples of student texts to show the potential of disciplinary literacy to enhance the writing of EAL learners and teachers’ professional learning. We demonstrate how an SFL approach can help to identify genres, generic stages, differences in register and lexicogrammar to reveal ‘power words, power grammar and power composition’ (Martin, 2013) in different disciplines.  The intention is to harness the insights from the BAWESS Project to enhance teachers' knowledge of discipline-specific language, and show how they can support EAL learners to develop power writing in the exam years.