Language resources to negotiate historical thinking in history classroom interactions

This article examines different patterns of language resources that both teacher and students use to incorporate other voices in history secondary-level classroom interactions. The study particularly centers on the analysis of interpersonal and ideational linguistic resources used by teachers and students that contribute to the inclusion of historical evidence in the discourse, in combination with the building of semantic waves (Maton, 2014, Maton, 2016) through the variation of semantic density and semantic gravity. The analysis shows that when teachers and students use a strong semantic gravity (SG+), they also have a tendency of employing a more heteroglossic-oriented discourse, whereas when teachers and students use a strong semantic density (SD+), their discourse tends to be oriented to more monoglossic choices in language (Martin & White, 2005). The language resources chosen by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions impact how historical thinking is constructed in the classroom; particularly regarding the space, these more or less specialized and nonspecialized language resources provide for the incorporation of epistemic and axiological sources, which are necessary to build history as an interpretative social science through different levels of abstraction.