EDUC91122 Literacy and Numeracy in the Curriculum
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · Semester 2 2026EDUC91122 Overview
- University of Melbourne
- Semester 2 2026
- Postgraduate subject
- Eight teaching modules
EDUC91122 Literacy and Numeracy in the Curriculum examines how secondary learners participate in increasingly complex disciplinary language, literacy and numeracy practices.
- Core lens Analyse literacy and numeracy inside the specific practices of a learning area.
- Teaching move Make hidden language, representation and reasoning demands explicit before guided practice.
- Reader model Diagnose comprehension through the relationship among reader, text and task.
- Planning test Connect every strategy to observable evidence and a clear transfer check.
How EDUC91122 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Planning document: Supporting reading and writing in a discipline area 2500 words | 50% | Mid-semester planning document. The Semester 2 schedule gives 24 September 2026 at 10:00am. |
| Planning document: Addressing numeracy opportunities in your discipline area 2500 words | 50% | Planning document due during the assessment period. The Semester 2 schedule gives 4 November at 11:00am. |
| Attendance Hurdle requirement: A minimum of 75% attendance at synchronous sessions · hurdle | Applies throughout the teaching period and is separate from the weighted tasks. |
The two weighted planning documents sum to 100%. To pass, students must separately meet the hurdle of at least 75% attendance at synchronous seminars throughout the teaching period; see the course assessment table and attendance guidance. The Task 2 assessment card retains an earlier year, while the Semester 2 2026 schedule gives 4 November at 11:00am; confirm the live assignment page before submission.
Current EDUC91122 dates
| Date | Item | Control |
|---|---|---|
| 24 September 2026, 10:00am | Reading and writing planning document | Current Semester 2 schedule |
| 4 November 2026, 11:00am | Numeracy opportunities planning document | Current Semester 2 schedule |
Dates are as published in the University learning schedule for Semester 2 2026. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.
What EDUC91122 covers
The guide follows the course's captured teaching sequence from situated language and academic registers through vocabulary, oracy, listening, reading comprehension, genre, multimodal meaning and scaffolded reading. The final chapter connects those ideas to the two planning documents.
Situated Language and Disciplinary Literacy
How identity, social context, activity and mode shape participation in a learning area.Literacy is not a neutral bundle of reading and writing skills that transfers unchanged between settings. It is situated in social practices, relationships, purposes and disciplines.
- Literacy as participation in socially situated practices
- The relationship between identity, purpose, audience and language choice
- How disciplines define valid evidence and valued ways of communicating
- Why general literacy proficiency does not guarantee disciplinary access
- How teachers can identify and explicitly teach hidden literacy demands
Academic Registers and Curriculum Complexity
Movement from familiar language toward abstract, technical and discipline-specific expression.Academic language differs from everyday conversation because it often compresses processes into dense noun groups, builds abstract relationships and removes immediate context.
- Register as language variation shaped by field, relationship and mode
- The continuum from context-dependent talk to context-reduced academic text
- Lexical density and the concentration of content in noun groups
- Nominalisation as a way to package processes into abstract concepts
- Planned movement between everyday and disciplinary formulations
Teaching Disciplinary Vocabulary
Word structure, concept boundaries, examples, non-examples and transfer into disciplinary use.Vocabulary instruction is most powerful when learners meet a term as part of a conceptual network, not as an isolated definition. Disciplinary words may have everyday meanings, contain revealing word parts or change significance across subjects.
- Selecting terms that unlock important disciplinary concepts
- Distinguishing technical, general academic and familiar words with specialised meanings
- Using morphology and word families to reveal relationships
- Building concepts through examples, non-examples and semantic connections
- Planning repeated receptive and productive encounters with new vocabulary
Oracy as a Resource for Learning
Speaking and listening as reciprocal processes for constructing and revising subject knowledge.Oracy is both a curriculum outcome and a medium through which learners develop ideas.
- Oracy as speaking and listening used to build and communicate knowledge
- Learning through social interaction, rehearsal and responsive feedback
- The distinction between participation volume and productive disciplinary talk
- Teacher moves that extend, connect and clarify student contributions
- Structures that widen access and link oral rehearsal to later writing
Monologic and Dialogic Classrooms
Teacher talk, question architecture, exploratory exchange and evidence-based consolidation.Monologic and dialogic teaching are not simple opposites of teacher talk and student talk. The important question is how authority, ideas and responses are organised.
- Monologic talk as transmission toward a fixed authoritative account
- Dialogic talk as engagement with multiple contributions and possibilities
- The initiation, response and evaluation sequence in classroom recitation
- How feedback can close a contribution or invite further reasoning
- Strategic movement between authoritative explanation and dialogic exploration
Active Listening and Talk Repertoires
Revoicing, integration, interpretation, critique and purposeful interaction arrangements.Productive talk depends on listening that changes what happens next. Active listeners track a speaker's claim, evidence and uncertainty, then respond by clarifying, paraphrasing, connecting, challenging or synthesising.
- Listening for meaning, evidence, stance and uncertainty
- Paraphrasing as a check on understanding rather than repetition
- Talk moves for clarifying, connecting, challenging and synthesising
- Ground rules and roles that support equitable participation
- Metatalk for reflecting on how a discussion developed knowledge
Reading Comprehension in Context
Alignment among reader resources, text demands, task purpose and disciplinary knowledge.Reading comprehension emerges from an interaction among the reader, the text, the task and the surrounding context. It cannot be located solely inside a learner or measured by correct recall after every text.
- Comprehension as an interaction among reader, text, activity and context
- The role of background knowledge and vocabulary in building a coherent mental model
- Text demands including cohesion, structure, density and multimodality
- Task purpose as a guide to attention, inference and evaluation
- Targeted scaffolds that maintain rather than remove disciplinary challenge
Genre, Text Structure and Multimodality
How social purpose, stages, language, layout, image and symbol organise meaning.Curriculum texts organise meaning through recurring social purposes, stages and combinations of modes.
- Genre as a staged way of achieving a recurring social purpose
- Text structure as a cue for anticipating relationships among ideas
- Signal language for sequence, cause, comparison and argument
- Multimodal meaning distributed across language, image, symbol and layout
- Explicit navigation between modes without assuming they repeat each other
Before, During and After Reading
A staged framework for preparation, monitoring, consolidation, evaluation and transfer.Reading support is most coherent when it is organised around what readers need before, during and after engagement with a text. Before reading, teachers establish purpose and activate only the knowledge needed to enter the text.
- Before reading: purpose, selective knowledge activation and productive prediction
- During reading: monitoring, annotation, questioning and repair
- After reading: synthesis, transformation, evaluation and application
- Teacher think-alouds as demonstrations of strategic decision making
- Gradual transfer from prompted strategy use to independent selection
Planning the Assessment Documents
An evidence-led route from disciplinary focus to teaching sequence, differentiation and review.The two assessment tasks ask for practical planning in a discipline area: one focused on supporting reading and writing, the other on addressing numeracy opportunities.
- Interpreting each planning document as a response to a disciplinary learning need
- Identifying specific literacy or numeracy demands in curriculum activity
- Aligning learning goals, evidence, modelling, guided practice and independent performance
- Planning differentiation that preserves the central intellectual demand
- Auditing coherence, evidence and presentation before submission
The subject frames language as cognitive and socially mediated, so classroom communication is understood through identity, context, purpose and the conventions of a learning area.
Students analyse how meaning is made through speech, listening, reading, viewing, writing, symbols, images, diagrams and other modes rather than treating literacy as print alone.
The teaching sequence represented in this guide develops that lens through academic registers, disciplinary vocabulary, classroom talk and reading comprehension.
It contrasts short evaluative exchanges with purposeful dialogue, treats listening as active intellectual work and connects reading success to alignment among reader knowledge, text design and task purpose. Genre, text structure and multimodality then provide tools for examining how disciplinary texts guide readers.
A before, during and after framework helps teachers select strategies by function, explain their rationale and move responsibility toward independent use.
Assessment is organised around two planning documents, each carrying half of the weighted mark. One addresses support for reading and writing in a discipline area; the other addresses numeracy opportunities in a discipline area.
To pass, students must also meet the separate hurdle of at least 75% attendance at synchronous seminars throughout the teaching period; see the course assessment table and attendance guidance.
The practical task across the subject is to identify a real disciplinary demand, ground the diagnosis in curriculum or classroom evidence, design explicit teaching and differentiation, and state how learner progress will be observed and used to guide the next decision.
Worked example · free
AskSia practice: diagnose a reading barrier before choosing a strategy
- 1Separate fluency from comprehension. The observable difficulty is coordinating information across diagram and prose to reconstruct the causal relationship.
- 1Model one cross-mode link by naming the diagram feature, finding the matching sentence and explaining how the two pieces jointly support the causal claim.
- 1Use a fresh explanation with a different layout. Ask the student to identify and justify the cross-mode link without the model, then revise the plan from that evidence.
Key terms
- Disciplinary literacy
- Disciplinary literacy is participation in the language, text, representation and reasoning practices valued by a particular learning area.
- Situated language
- Situated language is communication shaped by identity, social context, audience, purpose and the activity participants are carrying out.
- Academic register
- An academic register is a variety of language used to express formal, abstract and discipline-specific relationships in schooling.
- Oracy
- Oracy is the reciprocal use of speaking and listening to communicate, construct knowledge and develop thinking.
- Monologic talk
- Monologic talk is interaction dominated by one authoritative voice or short exchanges that close after evaluation.
- Dialogic teaching
- Dialogic teaching deliberately uses collective, reciprocal and purposeful talk to extend thinking and reveal learner understanding.
- Exploratory talk
- Exploratory talk is constructive joint reasoning in which ideas are challenged with reasons and alternatives are proposed.
- Active listening
- Active listening is effortful interpretation that may include acknowledgement, revoicing, integration, inference and critical evaluation.
- Reading comprehension
- Reading comprehension is meaning constructed through the interaction of reader resources, text features, task purpose and context.
- Genre
- Genre is a recurring way of organising language and other modes to achieve a social purpose for an audience.
- Multimodal text
- A multimodal text coordinates linguistic and non-linguistic resources such as print, image, layout, colour, symbol or diagram.
- Gradual release
- Gradual release is the planned transfer of responsibility from explicit modelling through guided practice to independent application.
EDUC91122 FAQ
What does this subject focus on?
The subject focuses on how language, literacy and numeracy operate within secondary learning areas. It asks teachers to identify disciplinary demands, select explicit pedagogies, differentiate access and use assessment and feedback to support learners across varied abilities.
How is the subject assessed?
Assessment consists of two planning documents with equal weighted value. One addresses reading and writing in a discipline area, and the other addresses numeracy opportunities. To pass, students must also meet the separate hurdle of at least 75% attendance at synchronous seminars throughout the teaching period; see the course assessment table and attendance guidance.
What is the attendance requirement?
To pass, students must meet the published hurdle of at least 75% attendance at synchronous seminars throughout the teaching period. This condition is separate from the weighted planning documents; see the course assessment table and attendance guidance, track attendance independently and use the current subject process to resolve uncertainty about your record.
Why is literacy described as disciplinary?
Each learning area uses language, evidence, text structures and representations differently. Disciplinary literacy therefore examines how learners participate in those specific practices rather than treating reading and writing as identical generic skills across every subject.
How should I choose a reading strategy?
First identify the relationship causing difficulty among the reader, text and task. Then choose the smallest strategy that directly opens that relationship, explain its function and test whether the learner can use the same reasoning independently in a fresh text.
What is the best way to study the course?
Practise analysing real classroom artefacts. Name the disciplinary action, locate the language or representation demand, propose an explicit teaching move and state the evidence that would make you keep, fade or revise the support.
Questions students ask in each EDUC91122 chapter
- Why can a capable reader struggle with a curriculum task?
- General fluency does not reveal every discipline's assumptions about evidence, explanation and acceptable language. A learner may understand each sentence but still miss how historians evaluate perspective or how scientists connect observations to claims. Chapter 01 · Situated Language and Disciplinary Literacy
- Is academic language simply formal vocabulary?
- No. Vocabulary matters, but academic register also changes how clauses connect, how agency is represented and how information is packaged. Dense noun groups, nominalisation and explicit logical relations can be as important as technical terms. Chapter 02 · Academic Registers and Curriculum Complexity
- Which words deserve explicit teaching?
- Prioritise terms that carry central concepts, recur across a unit, have misleading everyday meanings or unlock a family of related words. A small number taught deeply usually creates more access than a long undifferentiated list. Chapter 03 · Teaching Disciplinary Vocabulary
- Is more student talk always better?
- No. Talk supports learning when it has an intellectual purpose, equitable participation and a connection to the discipline. Unstructured conversation can reproduce dominance patterns, remain superficial or drift away from the knowledge being developed. Chapter 04 · Oracy as a Resource for Learning
- Is teacher explanation necessarily monologic?
- An explanation is authoritative, but it can sit within a broader dialogic sequence. A teacher may explore learners' ideas first, provide a precise account when needed and then reopen talk so students apply, question or connect the explanation. Chapter 05 · Monologic and Dialogic Classrooms
- How is active listening different from being quiet?
- Silence may indicate attention, uncertainty or disengagement. Active listening becomes visible when a learner represents another contribution accurately and uses it to clarify, connect, question or extend the group's reasoning. Chapter 06 · Active Listening and Talk Repertoires
- Can accurate oral reading coexist with weak comprehension?
- Yes. Accurate decoding makes written language available, but readers must still connect ideas, activate knowledge, resolve references and infer relationships. Diagnosis should distinguish access to words from construction of meaning. Chapter 07 · Reading Comprehension in Context
- Is genre the same as a fixed writing template?
- No. Genres have recognisable purposes and patterns, but they vary with audience, context and discipline. Teaching stages should reveal available choices, not require every successful text to follow one rigid sequence. Chapter 08 · Genre, Text Structure and Multimodality
- Should every reading lesson include all three phases?
- The phases are a planning lens, not a compulsory worksheet. Some texts need minimal preparation or an extended during-reading investigation. What matters is that support responds to purpose and includes meaningful consolidation or use. Chapter 09 · Before, During and After Reading
- What are the two weighted assessment tasks?
- The official assessment listing specifies a 2500-word planning document on supporting reading and writing in a discipline area and a 2500-word planning document on numeracy opportunities in the discipline. Each contributes 50 percent. Chapter 10 · Planning the Assessment Documents
How to prepare for the assessments
Study by applying the course concepts to one real learning area rather than memorising definitions in isolation. Begin with a curriculum outcome, classroom text, diagram, task or interaction. Identify what students must do as disciplinary participants and list the linguistic and non-linguistic resources that carry that work.
Next, use the chapter lenses in sequence: check register and vocabulary, inspect who speaks and listens, analyse the reader-text-task relationship, then map genre, structure and multimodal design. For each point of friction, choose one primary teaching move and write its purpose in a sentence. Rehearse explaining how modelling becomes guided practice and how the support will be faded.
Finish every study session with a fresh case that preserves the reasoning demand but changes the topic or representation. That transfer step shows whether you understand the principle well enough to use it in planning. Keep assessment preparation tied to current task instructions, and confirm due dates, rubric language and submission requirements on the live LMS page.
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