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Literacy Across Curriculum

Curriculum requires students to have literacy skills to interpret and compose texts across different disciplines. This involves teaching students about how language choices represent ideas through genres and how disciplinary knowledge is organized in subjects like science, history, and geography. As students progress into secondary school, the language they are exposed to shifts from common-sense to more complex language expressing less common ideas. Literacy teaching needs to be integrated across all school subjects. Technical language goes beyond direct experience and is used by experts to classify information, which can make it difficult for non-experts to understand. Developing competence in comprehending increasingly technical vocabulary is crucial for literacy development in middle years.

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Aubrey Abuan
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152 views

Literacy Across Curriculum

Curriculum requires students to have literacy skills to interpret and compose texts across different disciplines. This involves teaching students about how language choices represent ideas through genres and how disciplinary knowledge is organized in subjects like science, history, and geography. As students progress into secondary school, the language they are exposed to shifts from common-sense to more complex language expressing less common ideas. Literacy teaching needs to be integrated across all school subjects. Technical language goes beyond direct experience and is used by experts to classify information, which can make it difficult for non-experts to understand. Developing competence in comprehending increasingly technical vocabulary is crucial for literacy development in middle years.

Uploaded by

Aubrey Abuan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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INTRODUCTION

Literacy across the curriculum


Literacy across the curriculum requires children and young people to have skills which enable
them to interpret and compose texts across different disciplines. This involves teaching that
prompts learning that

 embeds a grasp of how different language choices and patterns represent and document
ideas and views of the world through a range of genres
 develops a sense of the way disciplinary knowledge is organised (for example, in science,
history or geography). 

Each subject or discipline, such as Science or History, has its own distinctive literacy demands
(Christie & Derewianka, 2008). The Toolkit promotes an informed understanding of texts
common to various disciplines, including English, which contributes to teachers’ capacity to
support children’s interpretation and composition of a variety of print based and multimodal
texts (Myhill, Jones & Watson, 2013).

Curriculum require students to have literacy skills which enable them to interpret and compose
texts across different disciplines. This involves teaching about how different language choices
and patterns represent and document ideas and views of the world through a range of genres. It
requires developing a sense of the way disciplinary knowledge is organized, for example in
science or history or geography.

Theory to Practice
Christie and Derewianka (2008) examine the reading and writing demands of the subject areas
English, Science and History. Their detailed account documents the varying texts and
grammatical choices which shape and establish disciplinary knowledge in these subjects. Across
the years of primary schooling Christie and Derewianka (2008) note a shift across from simple
common-sense knowledge to more elaborated and expanded forms of language which expresses
increasingly more ‘uncommon-sense’ knowledge as students transition into secondary school. 
Similarly, Humphrey (2017) outlines differences between genres and ways in which language is
used in everyday and academic domains. For example, she notes instructions, observation,
description and personal recount as genres within the everyday domain, while procedure, report
and historical recount feature in the academic domain. Like Christie and Derewianka, Humphrey
notes the shift from ‘non-technical ideas’ in the everyday domain to ‘ideas of academic
disciplines’ (2017, p. 11).

For example, ‘talking science’ in early primary requires students to ‘identify and describe
examples of the external features and basic needs of living things’ (VCAA, Science F-10). At
Levels 3 and 4 in History students ‘explain how and why life changed in the past, and identify
aspects of the past that remained the same’ (VCAA, History F-10), while by the end of Level 6
in Geography, students ‘identify and describe locations including the major countries of Europe,
North America and Asia’ (VCAA, Geography F-10).  What is clear here is that literacy teaching
needs to be part of all subjects taught in primary schools and secondary schools.

Defining common-sense and technical language


To communicate with established knowledge in the various domains of the curriculum, it is
essential that students are able to both understand and use technical terms. In these ways,
students are required to learn to use language in new ways as they master the registers and text
types of the subjects they are learning.

Common-sense language

Common-sense language is language based on directly observable experience.

Technical language

Technical language is expert knowledge that goes beyond observable experience. Technical
terms are the direct result of the kinds of knowledge scientists, geographers and other specialists
are involved in developing as they study, classify and reclassify the world into taxonomies.

Essential for learning

Common-sense knowledge and understandings are therefore based on observable, everyday


criteria while technical knowledge goes beyond the observable.

Technical knowledge and understandings help explain why scientists, geographers,


environmentalists, mathematicians and other specialists in their disciplines may be hard to
understand. The words they use in their speech and their writing are difficult for someone outside
of their field to understand.

Literacy development in the middle years draws heavily on increasingly technical language. The
vocabulary that is needed can either be technical or specialized. Understanding these terms is
crucial to students developing competence in comprehension.

Common-sense versus technical: in depth

How would you group the following: an apple, a pear and a pumpkin?

What criteria would you use?

Did you put them all into one group?

Why or why not?

There are essentially two different ways of grouping things:


common-sense and uncommon-sense

Common-sense and Technical

References
Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School discourse: Learning to write across the years of
schooling. London: Continuum.

Humphrey, S. (2017). Academic literacies in the Middle Years: A framework for enhancing
teacher knowledge and student achievement. New York and London: Routledge.

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Last Update: 29 August 2018

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