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Creating abstraction in school history writing

10 February 2018

Creating abstraction in school history writing: Grammatical metaphor

Anne McCabe, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus

Friday March 9 at 12:10 pm in room 3.66, John Percival Building, Cardiff University

This talk traces the abilities of Spanish secondary school students to write about history in English using the concept of grammatical metaphor (GM). After providing some background into GM and its potential for tracing students’ development in their abilities to write more abstract texts, I will show results of a longitudinal study of Spanish secondary school students writing in English as a foreign language for their history classes in a bilingual school in Madrid. The study analysed the students’ texts for nominalizations and abstract nouns, and results showed an increase in the types and tokens used over the four years, as well as in accuracy of form.