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.

Find out more about the BAWESS Project](/projects/disciplinary-literacy-corpus-based-pedagogy-the-bawess-corpus-project/)

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.