This is the first of a three-part post focusing on what
I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive
concepts.
It aims to set out an approach to teaching substantive
concepts by explicitly engaging with the linguistic structures of the
historical discipline. I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the
upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so
this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological
approach to this work.
Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much
welcome!
History is a language-based discipline.
As Caroline Coffin noted in an influential book from almost
20 years ago, teaching history requires a significant degree of linguistic
instruction, “making visible the key linguistic resources for making historical
meaning” in order to “give students access to the language of history [my
emphasis] in a systematic way.” (Coffin, 2006)
Of course, this actually makes history little different from
other subjects taught in schools. All subject disciplines are language based in
that they have their own distinct linguistic structures, comprising
subject-specific terminology and perhaps even grammar and syntax. It’s worth
considering for a moment, because it means in practice that schools place
considerable intellectual demands on both students and teachers in a way that
is not always appreciated.
When students make their way from one lesson to another,
they move not just between different discipline areas, but also between
different linguistic worlds, each with their own language structures. Schools
therefore effectively require students to “code switch”, that is, flip
constantly between different varieties of language specific to different
subjects. In order to successfully navigate between discipline areas in school,
students must not just master subject contents, but also different subject
languages, establishing a level of fluency that enables them to engage with and
use multiple language varieties every day.
What does this mean for us? I think we should see one of our
key tasks (and here I’m talking especially of history teachers) as teaching
students the language of our discipline. To do so, we have to immerse them into
as rich and absorbing a linguistic environment as we can, reflecting as much as
possible the language of history. This does not, however, simply mean that we
expose our students to new history-specific language by using it ourselves in
our classroom talk and texts. Doing so may begin to broaden students’ receptive
language (i.e. the language they can understand, recognise, and respond to),
which is an important first step. However, we also need to develop students’ expressive
language (i.e. the language they can use for themselves). And that
requires us to adopt deliberate linguistic strategies when teaching our
subject. In other words, we have to approach much of our history teaching as
if we were teaching a language.
Teaching the language of history is not an activity separate
from teaching the content of history. As Mariana Achugar and Catherine Stainton
put it, “learning the discipline implies learning new information and new ways
of thinking that are realised in new ways of using language.” (Achugar and
Stainton, 2009) Learning how to do the subject thus requires students to
learn the language in which it is communicated.
A number of history teachers have developed linguistic
approaches to classroom practice, demonstrating that the linguistic can indeed
“release the conceptual” and develop students’ knowledge and understanding
(e.g. Woodcock, 2005; Foster, 2013; Carroll, 2016; Fordham, 2016). Here, I’d like to
argue along these lines to suggest that a linguistic approach can be employed
effectively to teach one specific aspect of the discipline: substantive
concepts.
In what follows, I’ll examine what is meant by substantive
concepts and elaborate several linguistic approaches to teaching them. As I go,
I’ll draw out several pedagogical principles I think we can draw from this.
Substantive
Concepts
A substantive concept is a weighty conceptual term which
links together discreet historical instances across time and space.
More literally, it is an abstract noun which describes
recurring historical processes, events, or ideas, such as “revolution”,
“genocide”, “race”, “nation”, or “power/authority”. Considered in this way,
substantive concepts constitute what Jacques Haenen and Hubert Schrijnemakers
dubbed in a seminal Teaching History article “inclusive
historical concepts”. This term, although infrequently used today, remains
useful. It reminds us that substantive concepts function, in Haenen and
Schrijnemakers’ words, by “bringing together a set (a class or category) of
distinct objects.” (Haenen and Schrijnemakers, 2000)
Principle 1:
Substantive concepts are tools for ordering and framing, as well as analysing,
the past.
Substantive concepts are immensely powerful. Firstly, they
enable students to make sense of a huge range of information about the past,
which might otherwise drift apart into discreet details. Secondly, they provide
analytical categories through which students can explore linked phenomena
across time and space. Finally, they offer a useable language to help students
analyse complex historical events and processes, aiding what Carla van
Boxtel and Jannet van Drie term their “historical reasoning” in the
classroom (van Boxtel and van Drie, 2010).
Unpacking
Substantive Concepts: Morphology and Etymology
Very often, the meanings of a substantive concept and indeed
the word itself will be unfamiliar to students in the classroom, and so the
terms themselves require some preliminary unpacking. Here, linguistic
pedagogies are valuable.
Conceptual terms can be examined initially with the help of morphological
and etymological analysis. Broadly speaking, this means looking at the
component building blocks of words (morphology) and their origins (etymology).
To do so requires teachers, as expert users of these conceptual terms, to take
the lead in focused classroom discussion which engages students actively in
language analysis. Needless to say, this requires teachers themselves to have a
solid grasp of the language they are trying to teach their students.
Principle 2:
Linguistic analysis of substantive concepts, as with all complex language and
terminology in history, must be deliberately planned and led by teachers whilst
actively engaging students.
Consider the term “genocide” as an example. This can
be examined morphologically, breaking the word into its prefix (“geno-”)
and suffix (“-cide”). Students can be asked to identify other words they
know with these morphemes. In this case, it’s much easier to focus on the
suffix “-cide”, which appears in a number of common terms (“suicide”,
“homicide”, “pesticide”, etc.). Through a teacher-led discussion, the function
of this suffix can be drawn out – to kill or destroy. Having done so, students
can be introduced to the prefix, “geno-”, with which they are much less
likely to be familiar, and the teacher can proceed to the etymology of the term
“genocide”, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 by combining the
Greek prefix “genos-” (race or tribe) with the Latin suffix “-cide” (killing)
(Lemkin, 1944).
Morphological and etymological analysis led by the teacher
can be powerful. Students in my experience tend to be quite good at identifying
morphemes when invited to look for “words hiding inside” a term. Practice of
morphologically breaking down words can also help students access new concepts
in the future. Knowing that “-cide” denotes killing and destruction, for
example, provides a way into other concepts, such as the specific terms “regicide”
and “urbicide”. (Using existing knowledge of morphemes to access new concepts
is something that can even be done, as I’ll suggest in the next post, when
concepts are not in the English language).
Principle 3:
The linguistic tools used to unpack one substantive concept can enable students
to begin unpacking others.
Phonology:
“If you can say it, you can write it” (and read it, and recall it)
At its most simple, getting to know a new substantive
concept means learning a new word. Yet word-learning is in itself a deceptively
complex task. Amongst other things, it requires the learner to link the
phonological form of a word which they first hear (its sound form) to its grapheme
(written form) which they see and read, and then to begin establishing the
relationship of the word’s forms to its meaning (Schütze, 2025).
In practice, this means that, for students to begin to learn
new conceptual terms, they have to engage with them on multiple different literacy
levels. Seeing and hearing them is a necessary start, but saying them is also
vital. Getting students speaking new terms – deliberately and repeatedly – can
have a significant impact on their ability to independently write, read, and
recall them. In other words, speaking is essential to establishing new words as
part of students’ expressive (as opposed to their receptive) language.
MFL teachers often use oral practice to introduce new
vocabulary and grammar (“speak first”). This strategy may be useful in history
classrooms. We need to ask ourselves: Do we give students enough opportunity to
practice speaking new words out loud? If not, what are the opportunities to do
so?
Choral practice, where the teacher calls out the word and
the class repeats it, is a straightforward high-impact, low-cost way of having
students “get the feel” of a new word (even if it takes some getting used to,
for both teacher and students!). Doing so regularly can help students to
develop phonological recognition of new words and link their sound to their
written form encountered in class texts.
Asking students to then formulate in writing and then read
aloud their own single sentences using concepts can likewise provide low-stakes
opportunities to actively explore new words in an appropriate disciplinary
context. Students may first write a sentence independently and then speak it to
a partner, before being speaking it to the class, as a “write-pair-share”
exercise. With many schools (quite rightly) having abandoned reading strategies
such as “popcorn reading” which require students to read unfamiliar texts
“cold” to the class, asking students to read out their own short compositions
also provides valuable opportunities for them to practice voicing written
texts.
Principle 4: If
students can say a word, they can write it; they will also be more likely to be
able to read and recall it.
Beyond
Dictionary Definitions
Given the considerable effort it takes to introduce
substantive concepts systematically through language-focused instruction, could
we not shortcut the process by simply giving set definitions for students to
learn?
This would seem a simpler and faster approach. However,
there are good reasons to avoid doing so.
In the first instance, as Dominik Palek (2015) has
pointed out, simply getting students to memorise by rote set dictionary-style
definitions of words has mixed results. Students may be able to tell us what
the word is and repeat back to us what it means. But they are often unable to
grasp it with any degree of complexity or deeper comprehension. This suggests
that the precise meanings of substantive concepts, insofar as we attempt to
define them in our classroom, must be constructed through an active process of
discussion between teacher and students with reference to an appropriate
historical context. This in turn means that substantive concepts can only be
given real meaning through the examination and application of concrete
historical examples.
Principle 5:
Definitions cannot be given to be learned by rote; they must be developed
through active classroom conversation involving students and led by teachers,
as part of the learning of historical content.
This task gets more complex the closer we look at it.
One problem is that of semantic shift. The meaning
of a substantive concept tends to shift over time. As Michael Fordham has
pointed out, the precise meaning of a conceptual term is ultimately determined by
the context in which it is used and may change from one time period to another.
This means, Fordham suggests, that we must engage students in multiple concrete
historical examples, to show the range of (potential) uses a concept has:
“words need to be encountered multiple times throughout a curriculum, with each
encounter adding another layer of meaning to the word” (Fordham, 2017).
Considering the question of definitions, this means that
there can never really be one certain definition of a term applicable to all
time periods and contexts. More startlingly, it suggests that any definition for
a substantive concept we arrive at with our students must always be
considered provisional and subject to change and development.
Consider, for example, the conceptual term “revolution”.
While this could very broadly be described as a significant, sudden, often
violent change in the fabric of state, society, and/or the economy (itself a
rather woolly definition!), the meanings of this term that students actually
encounter are both far broader and far more specific, depending on the context:
|
Substantive
Concept: “Revolution” |
|
|
Concrete Historical Examples |
Key Elements/Connotations |
|
The English Civil War |
Regicide, parliamentary sovereignty, civil war,
dictatorship, religious change |
|
The French Revolution |
Regicide, parliamentary sovereignty, democracy, civil
liberties, dictatorship |
|
The Haitian Revolution |
Emancipation from slavery, rebellion and resistance,
anti-colonial protest, national independence |
|
The Industrial Revolution |
Technological progress, transport, new fuels, raw
materials, social class |
|
The Russian Revolution |
Socialism, communism, democracy, dictatorship, civil war,
international intervention, world war |
|
Cultural and Sexual Revolution |
Changing gender roles, sexual liberation, cultural
transformation, protest, fashion, music |
|
Decolonisation |
Empire, national independence, racism and “race”, Cold
War, democracy, dictatorship |
A second problem is that, in scholarly literature (and
therefore in much of the writing that students will encounter in the history
classroom), substantive concepts may be used in a variety of ways. The meaning
of a word is actually rather more fluid than can be captured in a single
definition. It may be, therefore, that we should embrace what the philosopher
Herman Cappelen (following David Chalmers) has dubbed “conceptual pluralism”
(Cappelen 2018, 22-23). According to this view, concepts have multiple
(potential) definitions which are (or can be) used, and a significant part of
our task should be in identifying and establishing these definitions and uses.
In the history classroom, engaging with conceptual pluralism is probably inevitable
on one level; if students encounter an unusual use of a term, we will have to
discuss with them how this term has been used in an unusual way.
Principle 6:
Definitions are slippery; they change depending on the context to which they
are applied and students’ level of understanding at that point in their
learning (and we should expect and encourage them to do so!).
What’s In
a Definition?
In fact, definitions themselves are actually quite blunt and
limited tools for understanding what a concept means. They do little to reveal
the internal content, or “intension”, of a concept. In other
words, a definition itself cannot truly indicate what a concept implies or
connotes, its characteristics and limitations. And without knowing its intension,
students stand little chance of being able to make meaningful connections
between a concept and its “extension”, that is, the concrete
historical phenomena to which it is applied.
Take our definition of "revolution" above (“significant, sudden, often violent change in the fabric of state, society, and/or the economy”). This tells us remarkably little of what a revolution actually is in practice. To gain a fuller understanding of what this term means in principle, students would need to know amongst a great many other things, that:
- a revolution (almost) always implies a change in power from one group to another;
- is usually violent (but not always);
- generally connotes a political change (often of government or system of government);
- may be used to describe new ideas, values, or cultural norms suddenly gaining in power and influence.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of the intension of
a concept like “revolution” implies developing a comprehensive knowledge of the
concrete historical examples which can be described as a revolution and
distilling from them a series of generalised observations. But this simply
cannot be expected of students in school, who (at least until their final years
of study) lack the breadth and depth of prior knowledge to even attempt such a task.
Instead, it must be constructed in the classroom through a conversation led by
the teacher.
This may be done through a Frayer Diagram, which includes
space not just for a definition and examples/non-examples of a concept, but
also for characteristics. Or, it could be fine through a more fluid classroom
conversation. In fact, the form of the activity for considering the intension
of a concept is probably less important than the method for doing so; as with
first unpacking a concept, exploring the intension of a new concept must take
place through an active classroom discussion, led by the teacher.
Learning the intension of a concept, however it is done, really matters. Knowing a concept’s connotations, implications, characteristics, and limitations is ultimately required for students to be able to apply concrete historical examples to that concept (i.e. to say that the sexual revolution of the post-WWII era is a revolution just like the French Revolution of 1789) and explain why they fit.
Principle 7:
The real meaning of a concept is more than just its definition. We cannot
assume that students will understand what a term really connotes without
exploring it with them.
In the next post, I will go on to discuss a rather
particular sub-category of substantive concepts: foreign-language terms which
have either been borrowed as loan-words into English or adopted within fields
of historical study for the specific purpose of ordering, framing, and
analysing a certain historic context.
Further
Reading
Mariana Achugar and Catherine Stanton, “Learning History and
Learning Language: Focusing on Language in Historical Explanations to Support
English Language Learners”, in Mary Kay Stein and Linda Kucan (eds.), Instructional
Explanation in the Disciplines, Springer (2010), pp. 145-169.
Carla van Boxtel and Jannet van Drie, “Historical reasoning
in the classroom: What does it look like and how can we enhance it?” Teaching
History 150 (2013), pp. 44-52.
Herman Cappelen, Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual
Engineering, Oxford University Press (2018).
James Edward Carroll, “Grammar. Nazis. Does the grammatical ‘release
the conceptual’?” Teaching History 163 (2016), pp. 8-16.
Caroline Coffin, Historical Discourse: The Language of
Time, Cause and Evaluation, Continuum (2006).
Michael Fordham, “Substantive Concepts at KS2 and KS3”, in Clio
et cetera blog (2017): https://clioetcetera.com/2017/11/09/substantive-concepts-at-ks2-ks3/.
Michael Fordham, “Knowledge and Language: Being Historical
with Substantive Concepts”, in Christine Counsell, Katharine Burn and Arthur
Champan (eds.), MasterClass in History Education: Transforming Teaching and
Learning, Bloomsbury (2016), pp. 43-57.
Rachel Foster, “The more things change, the more they stay
the same: developing students’ thinking about change and continuity,” Teaching
History 151 (2013), pp. 8-17.
Jacques Haenen and Hubert Schrijnemakers, “Suffrage, feudal,
democracy, treaty… history’s building blocks: leaning to teach historical
concepts”, Teaching History 98 (2000), pp. 22-29.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Rumford (1944).
Dominik Palek, “Finding the place of substantive knowledge
in history”, Teaching History 158 (2015), pp. 18-27.
Ulf Schütze, Language Learning and the Brain: Lexical
Processing in Second Language Acquisition, Cambridge University Press
(2025).
James Woodcock, “Does the linguistic release the conceptual?
Helping Year 10 to improve their causal reasoning,” Teaching History 119
(2005), pp. 5-14.
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