How Contemporary History is Presented in Chilean Middle School Textbooks

Abstract

This article provides a textual analysis of the pedagogical discourse of history textbooks used in the education of Chilean students. In particular, I focus on how the impact of Salavador Allende’s socialist government (1970-1973) and the military coup that led to the Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) are constructed by and displayed in these texts. As a method of analysis, I apply the Systemic Functional Grammar theory to history textbooks used in the sixth and eighth grades. Two of the metafunctions proposed by Halliday –textual and interpersonal –are particularly relevant when combined with an appraisal analysis fundamentally based on the work of Martin because they provide a useful tool for interpreting and explaining the text from an ideological standpoint. The analysis reveals that the textbooks’ authors strive to sound objective, but instead offer a large number of explicit and implicit judgements throughout the text. They purport to present two antithetical political positions – that of Allende’s supporters and that of the supportes of the military coup – however, the texts do not actually offer two clear positions nor do they provide clear reasons for the events. Instead, the authors obscure content through grammatical and lexical choices –such as the use of “and” as an expression of reason or cause; embedded mental and verbal projection (sixth grade only); the absence of logico-semanticrelationship of elaboration; and modal adjuncts that signal judgment but not explanation. Appraisal analysis in conjuction with a more discrete grammatical analysis is useful for revealing the explicit, subjective choices made in constructing these supposedly objective texts.