In K‐12 contexts, the teaching of English language learners (ELLs) has been greatly influenced by the theory and practice of content‐based instruction (CBI). A focus on content can help students achieve grade‐level standards in school subjects while they develop English proficiency, but CBI practices have focused primarily on vocabulary and the use of graphic organizers along with cooperative learning activities. This article reports the results of a project intended to enhance CBI through activities that focus on the role of language in constructing knowledge. The strategies we present are based on identification and analysis of the challenges presented by grade‐level textbooks in middle school history classrooms. By engaging in functional linguistic analysis, ELLs and their teachers can deconstruct the language of their textbooks, enabling students to develop academic language by focusing on the meaning‐making potential of the historian's language choices.
This article provides a textual analysis of the pedagogical discourse of history textbooks used in the education of Chilean students. In particular, I focus on how the impact of Salvador Allende's socialist government (1970-1973) and the military coup that led to the Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1990) are constructed by and displayed in these texts. As a method of analysis, I apply the Systemic Functional Grammar theory to history textbooks used in the sixth and eighth grades. Two of the metafunctions proposed by Halliday - textual and interpersonal - are particularly relevant when combined with an appraisal analysis fundamentally based on the work of Martin because they provide a useful tool for interpreting and explaining the text from an ideological standpoint. The analysis reveals that the textbooks' authors strive to sound objective, but instead offer a large number of explicit and implicit judgements throughout the text. They purport to present two antithetical political positions - that of Allende's supporters and that of the supporters of the military coup - however, the texts do not actually offer two clear positions nor do they provide clear reasons for the events. Instead, the authors obscure content through grammatical and lexical choices - such as the use of `and' as an expression of reason or cause; embedded mental and verbal projection (sixth grade only); the absence of logico-semantic relationship of elaboration; and modal adjuncts that signal judgement but not explanation. Appraisal analysis in conjunction with a more discrete grammatical analysis is useful for revealing the explicit, subjective choices made in constructing these supposedly objective texts.
This article focuses on how the dictatorships and subsequent transitions to democracy are portrayed in recent history textbooks used in secondary schools in Chile and Spain. These periods are considered crucial because they have dramatically impacted the social and political landscape and have shaped the course of historical events at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The textbooks adapted are particularly revealing since they reflect the official version of history that is being passed on to a new generation. We have chosen four textbooks as our corpus, two from Chile and two from Spain. As our analytical framework we use analyses of Transitivity and Appraisal (systemic functional linguistics) to determine how participants and processes are represented and evaluated in the texts. The way authors silence some social actors while giving prominence to others is a strategy for constructing causality and historical explanations in textbooks.
This paper analyzes certain patterns of voice realization of the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1991, established after the end of the military dictatorship (1973-1990). In this official document, produced and promoted by the Chilean Government, the authors strive to present themselves as powerless to judge society or to explain historical events. However, they propose evaluations (evoked and inscribed) of relevant sectors of society, offer an interpretation of history, and specifically, give explanation for the "military intervention" and the possible causes for the severe human rights violations during the dictatorship. Informed by the complementary theoretical approaches of SFL and CDA, I focus on Appraisal analysis (White 2000, 2003; Martin 1997, 2003, 2004; Martin & Rose 2003; Martin & White 2005) and a transitivity analysis of mental and verbal projections in the discourse, as tools for a more flexible and detailed exploration of the use of evaluation resources. This analysis allows us to create a systemic network of the patterns of grammatical and lexical resources used by the Commission to generate mitigation and self/others representation in the discourse. This linguistic analysis, inserted in a social practice, also offers a complementary understanding of the subjectivities found in the field of oral history, specifically in the study of testimonies that account for different and contradictory memories of the recent Chilean past (Stern 2006).
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