Academic Languaging and Historical Thinking: Cultivating Students’ Language Skills for Argument Writing

Academic Languaging and Historical Thinking prepares teachers to assess where students are in their written and critical thinking skills and to develop the art of teaching historical argumentative writing to students. The use of effective language to communicate historical, social, and civic arguments is a key competence future citizens need, and teaching writing through history is especially effective because of the grounded nature of historical documentation and the balance between clear facts and blurrier areas of interpretation.

Starting with a pedagogical approach, the book takes readers through research on the relationship between language and writing, the ways that historians make claims and the kinds of evidence they use, and how to successfully find and evaluate sources. It then offers instructional activities and strategies that center around key disciplinary practices in historical argumentation: making claims, sourcing and integrating evidence, presenting reasoning, and addressing counterarguments. These activities can be easily modified for different teaching and learning contexts, including supporting multilingual learners of English. Whether readers are practicing teachers, pre-service teachers, or instructional coaches, this book will help them learn how to integrate academic language skills with argument writing instruction in history to teach students to be confident academic writers and competent language users.

Undarmaa Maamuujav is currently a lecturer in the College of Education at Butler University, Indianapolis and a former research scientist in the School of Education at University of California, Irvine.
Jacob Steiss is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis and teaches undergraduate teaching candidates.