This paper reports on a design experiment (Brown, 1992) where we explored how providing a linguistic support for understanding historical documents affected students comprehension of historical documents and their disciplinary literacy. The functional approach to disciplinary literacy parallels historians' reading practices while supporting…

This paper explores patterns of language that construct causal reasoning in history textbooks used in the U.S. Two representative passages are analyzed to show how causality can be realized both explicitly and implicitly, and how the resources of the language contribute to highlighting some causal factors and downplaying others, particularly…