A Lexicogrammatical Approach To Improving A Level Students` Historical Causation Essays

I wanted to see if I could develop students' causal reasoning in their writing by explicitly concentrating on lexicogrammatical structures. The majority of attempts to develop linguistic skills synergistically with analyses of causation have tended to focus on vocabulary. (Ward 2006:15 and Woodcock 2005:11). This is extremely worthwhile, as the concept tends to be characterised by its highly specific lexis. (Coffin 2006). I wondered though if we were being unnecessarily reductive. Historical meaning is not solely expressed at the atomized level of the word. Little attention has been paid as to how to develop students' level of written expression syntactically or lexicogrammatically. (Halliday 1961) What 'lexicogrammatical chunks' do real historians use when discussing causation? More importantly, can they be used to liberate students' conceptualizations and expressions of causation?

All style and substance

Of course though, all style and no substance would not allow the students to develop conceptually competent and historically rigorous writing. It is important to note that what is described below was not intended as a literary exercise, but a historical one. (Bakalis 2003:18) Any activity would be pointless if the pupils mindlessly parroted the standards of explanatory writing as espoused by a genre theorist, yet displayed none of the reasoning that underpins the true historian's thinking at the moment of creation. These task were not about the language per se, but instead the 'students' historical analyses and how language might be a means to enhance them, right from the conception of the idea'. (Woodcock 2005:13) The end goal was certainly not for the students to produce one essay replete with stylistic flourishes, but to allow the pupils to effectively articulate newly developed causal reasoning that could be then reapplied in the future. Furthermore, I did not want to diminish the value of writing as a tool in regards to historical thinking, as 'it is only through writing that pupils can work out what they think and know' (Bakalis 2003:19) In this sense, the process of writing was not intended to simply record analytical thinking, but develop it.

The 'lexicogrammatical chunk' - the 3rd conditional With this in mind, I decided to focus upon the 3rd conditional clause with subject verb inversion. (Chapman 2003:49) The reasons for this are as follows.

. As shown in figure 2, many academic historians use the 3rd conditional in their causal analyses. It was therefore a lexicogrammatical chunk that could be modelled from authentic historical discourse. . . The 3rd conditional exists so that we can express contrary-to-fact, counterfactual reasoning. It is used to focus on a specific event in the past, and then creating a hypothesis as to how the rest of the past would have changed if the initial event had occurred differently. In fact, it takes some intellectual gymnastics to express counterfactual reasoning without using a 3rd conditional. As Ferguson (1997) and Chapman (2003) have persuasively shown, counterfactual reasoning is a natural heuristic for prioritising causal factors. Furthermore, counterfactual reasoning has the additional benefit of forcing students to critique historical inevitability. (Howells 1998) . As shown in figure 3, the 3rd conditional can be expressed through subject verb inversion. This syntactic reordering provides emphasis to a key point. (Burchfield 1996) This stylistic flourish is sometimes used by historians like Orlando Figes to express the magnitude of causes, particularly the 'cause of all causes'. (Carr 1961)

. When discussing a hypothetical historical event, it is impossible ever to be categorically certain. Historians however are able to grade the certainty of their contrary-to-fact hypotheses through the use of modal verbs of deduction, using this 'metadiscourse' to display indications of judgement, emphasis and uncertainty (see figure 4) (Crinsmore 1984 c.f Counsell 2004:101, Cousell 2004:22) Explicit analysis of the 3rd conditional therefore allows students to identify how historians use language to indicate the provisional strength of their claims. The oral rehearsal of the argument

The teaching and learning strategies discussed here were part of a broader sequence of lessons designed to help prepare a year 12 group for the Edexcel unit Edexcel GCE History: Russia in Revolution, 1881-1924: From Autocracy to Dictatorship', in which they will be required to construct convincingly argued causal arguments. Any explanatory causal essay is, by its very nature, an argument, and students therefore needed to recognise and learn the art of justifying their case. (Evans and Pate 2007:24) Without this, no amount of linguistic preparation would allow the students to write more effectively. (Counsell 2004:101) Only then could we explicitly analyse the language used by the historian, allowing the students to linguistically release and express the concepts that had been nurtured. I wanted the language to be a facilitating expression of thinking, not a substitution for it. (Evans and Pate 2007: 18) A card sort activity was created using the excerpts from Figes' book. (Appendix 2) The students were asked to use this information as well as their prior knowledge to prioritise the factors in order of causal weight. A card sort was chosen so that the students' memory could be supported and they could then concentrate on higher order thinking, delve into its argumentative complexity and truly wrestle with the historical problem of causation without the fear of making 'mistakes'. (Bakalis 2003:19, Evans and Pate 2007:20) As Vgotsky (1986:182 c.f. Barrs 2004:8) has noted, writing is 'the longest journey that thought has to travel', with inner thoughts translated, condensed and abbreviated until meaning is spelt out in words. Talk can act as a critical 'staging post' between thought and writing. (Barrs 2004:8, Woodcock 2005:9) It was vital that the students build their own opinions during the process, giving them a sense of ownership and agency needed in persuasive essay writing. (Harris 2001:14-15) The students were advised to prioritise the causes, with emphasis placed on the heuristic of counterfactual reasoning to justify their choices. This was elicited from the students, with Student A (Appendix 1 16.20) suggesting that a good technique would be to consider 'if it didn't (sic) happen, would the Bolsheviks still have taken over at all?' As Chapman (2003:47) has suggested, counterfactual questions provide 'the royal road to evaluating and ranking or to the elusive 'hierarchy' that is the ultimate aim of causal reasoning'. In these senses, I wanted the students to shape their writing at the 'point of utterance', articulating their ideas and evaluating and critiquing their opinions in relation to one another. (Britton 1980:65 c.f. Safford et al 2004:79) As the transcri pt from figure 6 shows, the students were showing awareness that their causal explanations were interpretations, reflexively adapting their arguments to critique the previous speakers. All of the students verbally used a 3rd conditional in attempting to justify their arguments, yet all expressed them in a grammatically incorrect manner. This may be evidence that the students were struggling to articulate the justifications for the arguments they had developed. Although the oral and written word are inextricably linked, they do not necessarily flow naturally from one to the other, and sometimes more scaffolding is required to move beyond talk. (Pate and Evans 2007:24) Now that this conceptual gestation period had been completed, the explicit linguistic input could begin so that the students could have the skills and confidence to express their thinking within the conventions of analytic, historical discourse. (Counsell 1997:16)

The explicit linguistic analysis

I consciously wanted to avoid the trap of the activity becoming too teacher-centred as in genre theory (Barrs 2004:9). Instead, I gave the students extracts of Figes' language and asked them to consider the differences in meaning, forcing them to think through using the context. (Sternberg 1987) Firstly, the students were asked to consider how they used the 3rd conditional in their argument, and the linguistic nuances involved. The piece de resistance by far though was when the students used latent semantic analysis to pre-empt the questions I had prepared on modal verbs. While we were looking at one example, Student 4. (Appendix 32.15) interjected and said 'wouldn't it be better to say might not have happened because if you say 'would' that's like saying 'I know for certain that it isn't going to happen' which isn't correct'. Using contextual examples, some of the students were metacognitively critiquing the target language, without teacher prompting, to consider the academic historian's use of metadiscourse. The written assessment

Due to the nature of the 3rd conditional discussed previously, as can be seen from figure 7 I decided to focus upon four facets of causal reasoning that I hoped the language chunk would develop. If we were to measure the success of the activity purely based on the extent of the use of the language, then the activity was successful. 12 of the 15 students used as least one 3rd conditional with subject verb inversion in their essays, with some students using more than one. (Figure 8) This criterion of success could mislead however, as appropriateness rather than quantity of use was desired. In fact, far from being a sign of achievement, this could in fact indicate that the students who overused the structure (for example student 7) had failed to grasp inversion's use for emphasising the importance of causes. It appears some students were simply producing in the hope that it would please the teacher instead of thinking critically as to whether its application was justified. This was not true of all the students however. Some used the structure as a way to express prioritisation of causes and to skilfully emphasis the 'cause of all causes'. This is evidenced in students 4's work in particular, who appropriately used inversion to emphasise the importance of Lenin's return in October, giving it more causal 'weight' in relation to other factors such as Trotsky's powerful position as head of the MRC. (Figure 9)

What was of interest then was whether the structure allowed greater expression of historical thinking against the criteria set. Some of the students, (3, 7 and 15), used a variety of verbs to distinguish the strength of their claims in the relation to the evidence. The best example was student 3 who used the modals to indicate the tentativeness of his conclusions. These examples indicate that the explicit teaching of modal verbs in the 3rd conditional may have allowed some students to articulate the debateable dimension of why historical phenomena occurred and hedge the nature of their hypothesis in the manner of an academic historian. The greatest strength of the teaching appeared to be that it focused the students' minds on the question. Of the 13 students who used the 3rd conditional, only two (students 9 and 13 Appendix 3) did not refer directly to the Bolsheviks' triumph. This suggests that the use of counterfactual reasoning provides a clear reference in the students' mind around which they can hypothesise. This manifests itself in thinking explicitly around the event in question in relation to their conception of a hypothesised past event, resulting in convincing explanations to the question asked. This is a pleasing result as this is something that typically students have difficulty with. (Woodcock 2005:9) It appears however that the explicit teaching of the 3rd conditional to express counterfactual reasoning did not allow all of the students to interrogate determinism. A small group of students continued to describe Lenin's assent to power teleologically. For example student 15 claimed that the Bolsheviks' triumph was 'inevitable'. Further work beyond the activities described here could be incorporated into the future, possibly those described by Howells (1998), in order for students to break free of this determinism and really wrestle with the idea of inevitability. It is important to remember that not all writing problems can be rectified in the course of one extended writing activity. (Moore 2009:130) Overall however, as Woodcock has shown with words, it appears that carefully selected 'lexicogrammatical chunks' can be used to develop students' understanding and expression of causal reasoning. (Woodcock 2005:14) The linguistic expression demonstrated and consolidated historical thinking, as opposed to acting as a substitute for it.