Historical discourse is a valuable contribution to the field of educational discourse analysis from a functional approach. Drawing heavily on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), in particular the work of Michael Halliday and Jim Martin, Coffin elucidates how to analyze, interpret, and evaluate historical discourse and compose good historical prose. Based on quantitative research, Coffin argues for the vital role of language in disciplinary teaching and learning.

Historical discourse is composed of 8 chapters, plus an appendix, glossary, and index. Coffin starts with ten questions addressing the aim, approach, scope, and structure of the book. Chapter 2 presents SFL theories that understand language as a “meaning potential” which realizes particular social functions. Following the discussion of genre (the structuring of texts), Coffin concentrates on the three register variables of social context – field, tenor, and mode – and how they are related to the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language.

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the elaboration of the three historical genre types, recording, explaining, and arguing, and subgenres of each. Each type serves different social purposes and therefore has different variable register features, realized by different lexicogrammatical resources. Coffin stresses that language use is a social act and a process of resource choosing. Text structures play important roles in history learning. According to Coffin, each (sub-)genre represents a perspective on the past, and the process of learning is one of acquiring linguistic strategies in construing history along a continuum from relatively personal and objective (recording) to public and more subjective (arguing).

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 concentrate respectively on three central factors of historical discourse: time, cause-and-effect, and evaluation, all of which are closely related to the historical genre types. That is, each genre chooses among potential temporal, causal, and appraisal resources to realize its social functions. Coffin approaches temporal resources by establishing categories and analyzing vocabulary and grammar features of each category. Her corpus-based study illustrates that the linguistic resource deployment of time varies across historical genres. Coffin therefore argues that in learning historical time, students move from a chronological arrangement (recording) to complicated conceptual reshaping (explaining, arguing). It is a process during which students learn to manage linguistic strategies for representing time that are appropriate for different text types. Following a similar structure, in chapter 6 Coffin explores the linguistic resources for causation in historical discourses. History students develop their ability to produce recording, in which external connection dominates, before upgrading to the explanation and then to the arguing genres, in which internal and abstract reasoning is in control. Chapter 7 centers on how to recognize and employ the evaluative resources of language in understanding and producing historical texts. After introducing Martin's APPRAISAL framework and voice theory, Coffin examines the three types of voice shown in her corpus and emphasizes the close relationship between voices, genre types, and APPRAISAL resources.

The final chapter summarizes the book, restating the pedagogic significance of the linguistic dimension of history and advocating a language-based model for curriculum planning in this field.