Writing for teachers, teacher-educators, textbook writers, and applied linguists, Coffin applies Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL; see Halliday & Matthiessen, Reference Halliday and Matthiessen2004) to the analysis of historical discourse. Her goal is to understand why students—especially Australian, British, and American secondary students—find reading and writing history texts so difficult.
Coffin starts with a lavishly illustrated chapter showing how the SFL conceptual tools of genre, and of field, tenor, and mode, label what makes some historical writings more valued than others and more likely environments for specific lexical or grammatical features. Rejecting a simple dichotomy between narrative and argumentation, she presents a taxonomy of nine subvarieties of historical texts, subsumed under three major SFL genres: recording, explaining, and arguing. Coffin shows each subvariety's social purposes and—citing both professional and student-produced writing—its typical linguistic features. Coffin organizes the nine subvarieties according to the developmental path that conventionally obtains in the education of 11- to 18-year-olds. For example, within the genre of recording, children first learn to retell events in their own lives, then in the lives of others, then to communicate events independently of experiencers, and then to account for a sequence of events. In the genre of explanation, students first explain factors that lead to a particular historical phenomenon and then explain consequences. Likewise for argumentation, exposition precedes discussion, which precedes the capacity to challenge assertions or interpretations.
According to Coffin, teachers should anticipate that each stage of mastery of the three genres will play a role as students gain control over historical discourse. With acquisition of the language for representing time, “the distance between the past and present intensifies … and a more detached sense of time develops” (p. 114), opening learners' awareness to finer distinctions between past and present, private and public. Coffin also provides a rewarding analysis of authorial voices used to represent the past—voices that foreground feeling, judgment, or appraisal of causation.
This work succeeds in communicating the inherent complexity of historical texts and in analyzing and labeling features that render them complex. It is challenging to read, albeit stocked with intriguing examples. However, Coffin does not address the difficulties of reading and writing about history within a culture that approaches the past warily and requires that historical accounts evince relevance to the present. However, that is a discourse for another day.
