An integrated language and content approach for history teachers

This article reports on a project that situates language teaching in the subject matter classroom, illustrating how a functional linguistics perspective can raise secondary school teachers’ awareness about the language challenges of their discipline and enable them to engage in discussion about language and content with their students. We report on the linguistic constructs that teachers without a background in language study were able to take up in analyzing passages from history textbooks, and show how this language awareness enables them to engage students in discussion of history content as they explore the meanings in texts written by historians. The integrated language and content approach we describe responds to recent calls for more situated and contextualized language teaching and illustrates a role that language teachers can adopt to contribute to the development of content-area teachers’ knowledge about language.