Disciplinary Literacy Practices in Secondary Education

Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialised reading, writing, speaking and reasoning skills that students need to engage meaningfully with the conventions of particular school subjects. In secondary education, this approach recognises that each discipline employs distinct ways of constructing and communicating knowledge, whether through narrative and argument in history, formal proof in mathematics, experimental reports in science, or notation and performance in the arts. Effective practice involves deliberate instruction in the literacy demands of each subject, including unpacking genre structures, linguistic features and visual or symbolic representations alongside content. Teachers act as literacy coaches, modelling disciplinary thinking and scaffolding student access to complex texts, tasks and tools. This work spans curriculum design, professional learning, assessment and equity considerations, ensuring that all students—regardless of background—gain the full benefits of subject-specific inquiry. Over the last decade, scholars have blurred traditional boundaries between language and content, emphasising multimodal resources, collaborative inquiry and culturally responsive materials to deepen engagement. Embedding literacy across subjects has been shown to enhance critical thinking, disciplinary identity and learners’ readiness for further study or civic participation.

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Disciplinary Literacy Practices in Secondary Education publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in disciplinary literacy practices in secondary education across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Disciplinary literacy: The specialised set of language and representation practices unique to a given subject area.

Source literacy: The ability to locate, evaluate and synthesise information from diverse disciplinary texts.

Analytic literacy: Competence in interpreting, reasoning and critiquing content according to disciplinary norms.

Expressive literacy: Skill in producing texts and representations that conform to a discipline’s conventions.

Pedagogical scientific language knowledge: Teachers’ understanding of how to make scientific terminology and discourse accessible and purposeful for students.

References

1. Operationalizing and validating disciplinary literacy in secondary education. Reading and Writing (2018).
2. Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Scientific Language Knowledge—A Systematic Review. Education Sciences (2022).
3. Including visual representations within senior high school biology assessment: Considerations of grammatical complexity. The Curriculum Journal (2022).