Caroline Coffin, Historical discourse: The language of time, cause and evaluation. New York: Continuum. Pp. xv, 224. Hb $150.00

Abstract

Historical discourse is a valuable contribution to the field of educational discourse analysis from a functional approach. Drawing heavily on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), in particular the work of Michael Halliday and Jim Martin, Coffin elucidates how to analyze, interpret, and evaluate historical discourse and compose good historical prose. Based on quantitative research, Coffin argues for the vital role of language in disciplinary teaching and learning. Historical discourse is composed of 8 chapters, plus an appendix, glossary, and index. Coffin starts with ten questions addressing the aim, approach, scope, and structure of the book. Chapter 2 presents SFL theories that understand language as a "meaning potential" which realizes particular social functions. Following the discussion of genre (the structuring of texts), Coffin concentrates on the three register variables of social context-field, tenor, and mode-and how they are related to the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the elaboration of the three historical genre types, recording, explaining, and arguing, and subgenres of each. Each type serves different social purposes and therefore has different variable register features, realized by different lexicogrammatical resources. Coffin stresses that language use is a social act and a process of resource choosing. Text structures play important roles in history learning. According to Coffin, each (sub-)genre represents a perspective on the past, and the process of learning is one of acquiring linguistic strategies in construing history along a continuum from relatively personal and objective (recording) to public and more subjective (arguing). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 concentrate respectively on three central factors of historical discourse: time, cause-and-effect, and evaluation, all of which are closely related to the historical genre types. That is, each genre chooses among potential temporal, causal, and appraisal resources to realize its social functions. Coffin approaches temporal resources by establishing categories and analyzing vocabulary and grammar features of each category. Her corpus-based study illustrates that the linguistic resource deployment of time varies across historical genres. Coffin therefore argues that in learning historical time, students move from a chronological arrangement (recording) to complicated conceptual reshaping (explaining, arguing). It is a process during which students learn to manage linguistic strategies for representing time that are appropriate for different text types. Following a similar structure, in chapter 6 Coffin explores the linguistic resources for causation in historical discourses. History students develop their ability to produce recording, in which external connection dominates, before upgrading to the explanation and then to the arguing genres, in which internal and abstract reasoning is in control. Chapter 7 centers on how to recognize and employ the evaluative resources of language i...

The learner's pathway to argumentation: an analysis of social studies inquiry design

“…Importantly, the way in which social studies teachers organically structure their IDMs via the learner's pathway is supported by educational linguistics research. As Coffin (2004Coffin ( , 2006a, Rose and Martin (2012), Humphrey (2017) and others (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2019;Veel and Coffin, 1996;Wallden, 2019) have noted, developing students' complex argumentation requires teachers to scaffold students' writing tasks in such a way that those students are enabled to build upon the linguistic resources of the former genres to construct the goal genre (argument, in this case).…”

“…Genre and social studies education. As genre-based pedagogy relates to social studies, Caroline Coffin (2006a) wrote the seminal work on school-based genres in the history classroom. She notes the pervasive use of three specific functions of writing in secondary The learner's pathway to argumentation social studies classrooms, including nine genres that perform those functions (see Table 1).…”

“…Achugar and Carpenter, 2012;Schleppegrell, 2005, 2005;Achugar and Stainton, 2010;Fitzgerald, 2012Fitzgerald, , 2014Fitzgerald, , 2019Schleppegrell et al, 2004;Schleppegrell and Achugar, 2003). When writing is a focus of these investigations, it is often student production that is analyzed Coffin, 2006aCoffin, , 2006bSchleppegrell, 2006) rather than on the ways that teachers scaffold instruction to help students meet the demands of complex disciplinary writing (see Mitchell and Pessoa, 2017 for one such study).…”

“…Once the genres were identified, formative assessment tasks were graphed to illustrate the relative progression of the learner's pathway teachers in a specific grade band developed for their inquiries. Graphing was vertically aligned using Coffin's (2006a) genre variations (see Table 1 above). Rather than evaluate any one inquiry as "good" or "bad," these graphs were compiled to identify patterns of learner pathways most commonly demonstrated by these inquiries.…”

Effects of a teacher-designed, subject-specific writing lesson on students' ability to write in history

“…Students face a significant cognitive barrier when it comes to writing in History because they must combine their awareness of the rhetorical demands of the text with their understanding of historical material and historical reasoning skills. Students face a significant cognitive challenge since they must combine their knowledge of historical material with historical reasoning skills (Coffin, 2006). in Coffin (2006), As a result, the youngsters' capacity for critical thought is given considerable attention.…”