Academic Languaging and Historical Thinking: Cultivating Students' Language Skills for Argument Writing
Academic Languaging and Historical Thinking: Cultivating Students' Language Skills for Argument Writing
by Undarmaa Maamuujav and Jacob Steiss
University of Michigan Press, 2026 Paper: 978-0-472-04008-7 | eISBN: 978-0-472-22244-5 (standard)
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
REVIEWS
“Academic Languaging and Historical Thinking offers teachers substantial theoretical, conceptual, and pedagogical advantages by extending teachers’ understanding of the relationship between historical thinking and writing, providing examples and non-examples of the different facets of writing and thinking, and including a wealth of instructional activities.”— Bob Bain, University of Michigan
“This book offers teachers comprehensive and explicit descriptions of the various rhetorical moves in constructing strong argumentation in history, the reasoning for them, and academic language involved. It includes many excellent reading and writing activities for students as well as guidance for teachers in how to select various components of the argument construction that best fit the abilities and needs of their student population.”— Jan M. Frodesen, University of California, Santa Barbara
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Language, Thinking, and Historical Argumentation
Chapter 2: Language Demands of and Support for Argumentation
Chapter 3: Making a Claim for Historical Argumentation
Chapter 4: Sourcing and Integrating Evidence
Chapter 5: Reasoning to Advance a Historical Argument
Chapter 6: Presenting and Addressing Counterarguments
Conclusion
Glossary of Terms
References
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