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 Salvador 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 supporters 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-semantic relationship of elaboration; and modal adjuncts that signal judgement but not explanation. Appraisal analysis in conjunction with a more discrete grammatical analysis is useful for revealing the explicit, subjective choices made in constructing these supposedly objective texts.