On 26 and 27 June 2025, the Department of Education will host its Second Disciplinary Literacy Symposium.
At this event, you can hear about the latest thinking and developments in disciplinary literacy. This event is for secondary school teachers and researchers.
About this project
The academic writing that is crucial for success in secondary school exams is demanding for all learners regardless of their cultural and linguistic background.
Each subject discipline constructs and communicates its knowledge in different ways, which means that students must know how, for example, to write as a Historian compared to a Scientist. Even though they may display knowledge and understanding of a subject area, they could fall short when writing in an exam because they lack the required ‘disciplinary literacy’ skills.
This inability to properly reflect their content knowledge through discipline-appropriate language may translate into underachievement and eventually limit their future opportunities for progression.
Subject teachers may encounter similar hurdles. Explicitly teaching writing for curriculum learning can have huge benefits for learners, yet supporting disciplinary literacy development requires teachers to understand and be able to teach not only the content inherently important to a discipline, but also how to express it in ways that meet discipline-specific expectations.
This project will help to upskill and empower both teachers and students to understand and better apply disciplinary literacy knowledge and skills.
'…if we were to get disciplinary literacy right, for a huge number of pupils, the benefits would be out of all proportion to the collective effort it would demand.’
Alex Quigley, Head of Content and Engagement at the Education Endowment Foundation
Project overview and background
The BAWESS project has secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), one of the most competitive research funders in the UK. The ESRC, part of UK Research and Innovation, is the UK’s largest and most prestigious funder of economic, social, behavioural and human data science. The BAWESS project will run from 1st February 2025 for three years.
The project aims to investigate the nature of disciplinary language for successful writing in school exams across the curriculum. We will develop the first-ever discipline-specific large language database (corpus) of student-written texts in the exam years. The corpus will be shared as a publicly accessible online resource that enables users (teachers, students, researchers and the public) to explore disciplinary literacy, language development and various teaching and learning aspects of writing.
Resources that support teaching and learning will be created so that the project leads to an improvement in the teaching and learning of disciplinary literacy. We will adopt a multifaceted approach, including discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, to provide unique and systematic insights into the patterns, structures and language choices of effective writing in the exam years in different disciplines.
Be part of the BAWESS project
We will offer
- CPD sessions for teachers within curriculum subjects on disciplinary literacy
- SEND and EAL-specific training to support students with further needs
- Access to workshops and a writing festival to teach students how to use the digital database (corpus) to become ‘disciplinary language detectives’ to support their learning
- The opportunity to be one of the first schools to participate in leading research of this kind into disciplinary writing at secondary school level in both national and international contexts
- Recognition of your school as a founder member of and participant in the BAWESS Project 2025 – 2028
What you'll need to do
We are not asking students to do any extra work. We are asking you to collect your students’ responses to longer answer writing tasks that you are currently doing in your GCSE, IGSCE, A level or IB classes.
We would like you to copy and anonymise students’ written work following a few simple steps and share some contextual information, also anonymous, in relation to your students.
Students’ texts will be digitised and these will become part of the bigger corpus. Consent forms for student participation will be provided.
Support will be available if needed to carry out any of the above tasks so that schools do not feel unnecessarily overburdened with administration.
Information sheets
Please read these information sheets carefully and ask us if you have any questions about any details of the project, or what taking part would mean for you.
- BAWESS corpus project: Young person information sheet
- BAWESS corpus project: Student participant information sheet
- BAWESS corpus project: Teachers' information sheet
- BAWESS corpus project: Parent or guardian information sheet
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
1. Which subjects are you interested in collecting?
We are interested in any subjects as long as they relate to GCSE, iGCSE, A Level or IB exams.
2. What kind of texts are you collecting?
We’re collecting coursework, mock exams, and official exams (returned to you by the exam board) from current and previous years.
3. How many texts would you like to collect?
There’s no minimum or maximum number of texts we’d like to collect. We’re keen to collect as many samples of student-written work as possible. The bigger the sample of student writing, the more accurate our analysis and findings will be.
4. What are the criteria for the data collection?
The texts must be written in English and relate to GCSE, iGCSE, A Level or IB exams. The students must be over the age of 14 years old and must have the capacity to personally agree to voluntarily participate in the study.
5. Do all my students have to take part?
Only students who volunteer to take part and give us their consent to participate in the study will be included in the data collection. In practice this means that not all students in your class(es) might be participating in the project.
6. Is there a deadline for submitting texts to your research team?
We plan to be conducting data collection until the end of the academic year 2025/2026, so you can submit collected texts anytime between now and July 2026.
7. What support will be available?
We’ll do all we can to support you in collecting, anonymising and sharing the student texts accompanied with contextual information. We’ll provide clear guidelines. Additionally, members of the BAWESS research team will be available to go to your school to provide support with any tasks relating to data collection, so that schools do not feel unnecessarily overburdened with administration. Alternatively, we’re happy to pay for a supply teacher to free up participating teachers to enable them to carry out the required tasks.
8. How can I, as a teacher, benefit from getting involved?
We’ll give you access to the ‘Teacher Area’ on our website, where you’ll be able to explore useful materials on disciplinary literacy. We’ll also offer CPD sessions, SEND and EAL-specific training, and workshops to demonstrate how to use the BAWESS corpus to improve examination writing.
9. If I agree to take part and later change my mind, can I withdraw?
You can withdraw from the project without providing reasons for doing so and without consequence.
10. Who do I contact for general enquiries?
Please email bawess@bath.ac.uk for any BAWESS-related enquiries.
11. Who do I contact if I have a concern, or I would like to complain?
If you have a concern about any aspect of the project, please contact the main researcher, Gail Forey at the University of Bath (email: g.forey@bath.ac.uk), who will do her best to answer any questions. If Gail is unable to resolve your concern or you wish to make a complaint regarding the project, please contact the Research Governance and Compliance Team (research-ethics@bath.ac.uk)