1. Beyond NCEA Level 1 Literacy
This powerpoint provides some suggestions for teachers working with students who may have challenges around literacy but are capable of working towards Curriculum Levels 7 and 8 – NCEA Levels 2 and 3.
It suggests some strategies for supporting the development of disciplinary literacy skills across curriculum areas. While the powerpoint refers to the challenges for students in year `12 and beyond, ideally, the development of these skills should be occurring throughout a students’ school ecperience.

2. Literacy beyond the demands of Level 1
Disciplinary
Intermediate
Basic
Disciplinary Literacy: Literacy skills specialised to history, science, mathematics, literature, or other subject matter.
Intermediate Literacy: Literacy skills common to many tasks, including generic comprehension strategies, common word meanings, and basic fluency.
Basic Literacy: Literacy skills such as decoding and knowledge of high-frequency words that underlie virtually all reading tasks.
Students are faced with increasingly sophisticated and subject-specialised literacy demands as they progress through their schooling – especially their qualification years. This applies to every subject area. There are disciplinary literacy skills required in all subjects – science, mathematics, technology. We also talk about the need for some generic literacies eg digital literacy, data literacy. The increasing requirements are shown in this diagram.
While many student acquire these literacies through their learning, there are some deliberate actions teachers in all subject areas can undertake in order to support students to develop the skills they need for further learning.
In particular:
Achievement at Curriculum Level 6, 7 and beyond requires moving beyond decoding and basic comprehension into sophisticated interpretation, inference, judgement and higher order skills.
Students need to acquire specific vocabulary of subject areas. This includes both ‘big’ words (eg photosynthesis) and those with specific disciplinary meaning (eg dense). .
Being able to identify key words that influence the interpretation of the concept or the the task – words such as ‘but’, ‘unless’, and ‘when’ provide essential cues to interpreting content and context matters but can be overlooked by readers with some literacy challenges.
Subject specific literacy requires subject teachers to teach the literacy requirements of the discipline as well as the subject content and knowledge.
Shanahan & Shanahan’s (2008) model of the increased demand for specialisation of literacy development

3. Teacher actions for literacy enhancement
Students need exposure to extended texts that require interpretation within the discipline context.
What are some actions teachers in all subject areas can take to support the development of disciplinary literacy? These actions are based on the findings from research completed called: Literacy and Language Pedagogy within Subject Areas in Years This can be accessed at:
Firstly, the study found that well-intentioned teachers, to support those who struggled with reading and interpreting texts, removed much of the reading requirements from their course. Students then ended up reading teacher prepared scripts that provided minimal information on course content. Students did not get exposure to long, complex texts.
The study found that (in mathematics and science classes), 90% of information delivered to students was teacher prepared, and 10% came from published texts. By Year 11, this had dropped to 3%.
The texts provided to students were very short. In Year 9, 43% of texts contained 100 words or less and 3% had more than 300 words. In Year 11, 39% of texts contained 100 words or less and 15% had more than 300 words.
Therefore, the study shows that classroom texts are mostly short texts - created by the teacher. These are already stripped to the basics. No interpretation or analysis is required by the student.
Teacher action: exposure to texts that require engagement with the text to extract or interpret meaning. This will give students opportunity to derive meaning from context, explore content within contextual situations and to critically interpret texts.

4. Teacher actions for literacy enhancement
Vocabulary and literacy demands need to go beyond a glossary of terms
The most commonly observed literacy activity observed in these science and mathematics classes was vocbulary. These were observed in 40% of the Year 11 classes observed.
However, for disciplinary literacy, vocabulary acquisition is more than a list of words. Teachers considered knowledge of vocabulary as an important subject-specific literacy goal. In particular, knowledge of challenging or conceptually important subject-specific vocabulary. There is a need to go beyond the provision of glossaries and simplistic definitions and into context and interpretive vocabulary development.
The study found, from all the Year 11 classroom observations:
Vocabulary instruction occurred in 40% of the observations
Instruction regarding audience and/or purpose occurred in 13% of the observations
Instruction regarding spelling or punctuation occurred in 5% of the observations
Instruction regarding literacy structure occurred in 4% of the observations

5. Teacher actions for literacy enhancement
Extended discussions to give students opportunities to build and use subject –specific language and demands
Formative assessments should allow practice of skills not just content
Opportunities for extended engagement with fuzzy concepts. As lessons are made easier for students, tendency to move to more short answer Question and Answer sessions – not extended discussions between teacher and students.
Teacher action: Student opportunities to move beyond the ‘facts’ required within the subject to exploration around the fuzzier applications and contexts.
Formative assessments – move beyond specific content into wider skills and context settings.
The study summarised its observations regarding classroom practices as follows:
Texts were often short, teacher-designed, content or exercise-based texts that were delivered via the whiteboard.
Most teacher activity, between subjects and across year levels, was Q & A, followed by rove and management.
There were few instances of student differentiation. In other words, students were engaged in the same undifferentiated activity most of the time
Students worked individually, or as a whole class, for the majority of the observed time.
Literacy instruction was predominantly vocabulary-based instruction. Of the literacy-based activities students were engaged in, reading was the most common, followed by writing. We observed few instances of reading and writing activities.

6. Teacher actions for literacy enhancement
Need a focus on critical literacy and instructional depth
critical literacy and instructional depth
One of the aspects of literacy instruction that we analysed was what the report called ‘instructional depth’. Complexity of teacher language and opportunities to engage with teachers in deep concepts and applications.
Teacher action: Deliberate focus on critical literacy and instructional depth
The study sought to distinguish five ways in which students might be asked to engage with either general, or more subject-specific, literacy learning (see p. 43). The proportion of observations that included that strategy in Year 11 classes is provided in brackets.
Item: direct teaching of item, eg, “a micro-organism is a …”. (28%)
Activating Prior Knowledge (APK): reference to, use of background, and event knowledge, eg, “What do you already know about the term ‘micro’, as in ‘microscope’?”. (2%)
Practice: opportunity to apply knowledge or skill that students already have, eg, “Try to make a list of all the words you know that have ‘micro’ as a part”. (52%)
Strategy: teaching of strategy, eg, “When you are faced with a word such as this, try seeing if you can identify the meanings of the word parts”. (16%)
Critical: instruction related to questions of power and text use, eg, bias, positioning and critique. “Why do you think you or another author might choose to use the word ‘micro-organism’, instead of the word ‘germ’?” (3%)

7. New Zealand Curriculum Requirements
“for each area, students need specific help from their teachers as they learn … how to listen and read critically, assessing the value of what they hear and read” (NZC, p. 16).
Attention to the development of discipinary literacy is not jsut to support students to achieve qualiifications. It is a requirement of the new Zealand Curriculum.
Critical literacy is an explicit focus of the NZC, in terms of the key competencies, as well as in the learning areas, “for each area, students need specific help from their teachers as they learn … how to listen and read critically, assessing the value of what they hear and read” (NZC, p. 16).
Therefore – an essential as we work towards the curriculum vision: Confident, connected, actively-involved, life-long learners.