Historical literacy in bilingual settings: Cognitive academic language in CLIL history narratives

- Second language competence deeply affects history learning in bilingual settings.
- Mainstream CLIL history teaching permits the full development of CDFs.
- Recurring language features form historical syntax and discourse.
- Some historical discourse functions are beyond the capabilities of learners.
- The interface between content and language is central to history curriculum development.

Language competence has proven to vary substantially across school disciplines. This paper explores historical literacy, a major research issue in current European language policies. Specifically, it reviews the literature on how history content relies on language structures and how the ability of students to tell historical narratives depends on their individual competence level, both in a first and second language. However, historical biliteracy has to date been regarded mainly as a theoretical construct which would benefit from an empirical analysis that tests the descriptors provided for historical communication in a first and second language (Council of Europe, 2015). To this end, this paper conducts a corpus study of the bilingual historical narratives of secondary school students and provides evidence of the major cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) that appear in the literature (hypothesising about history, explaining history, describing historical events, expressing causality, taking an ideological stance, etc.). The results are tabulated and discussed, providing conclusions that may prove useful for L2 and history learning and curriculum development in bilingual education and CLIL settings. Thus, this paper intends, for the first time, to provide empirical support for L2 historical literacy classifications and to describe the integration of history content and language (L2) by the end of compulsory schooling in secondary education.