"die geschichte, die wir nie gelernt haben" students talk history peer interaction and historical thinking in a foreign language classroom Claudia Baska Lynn

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Lynn, Claudia Baska, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Educational Linguistics., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sociolinguistics.

Curriculum development.

Foreign language instruction.

Linguistics.

Language arts.

0636.

0727.

0444.

0279.

0290.

Local Subjects:

Sociolinguistics.

Curriculum development.

Foreign language instruction.

Linguistics.

Language arts.

0636.

0727.

0444.

0279.

0290.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (279 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Collegiate foreign language programs have increasingly responded to sociocultural, political, and institutional pressures by insisting that language and culture are inseparable and by expanding curricula to include historically and politically consequential content. At the same time, foreign language pedagogy has offered relatively few principled accounts of how language and disciplinary content might be integrated in practice, leaving historical material in particular often treated as contextual background rather than as an object of inquiry in its own right. This practitioner inquiry investigates what happens when pedagogical approaches from historical thinking are taken up in an advanced foreign language curriculum, with a specific focus on how historical thinking is mediated through oral peer interaction in the classroom. Situated in a fifth-semester undergraduate German course, the study examines peer discussions of historical topics as students engage with tasks designed to scaffold inquiry, treating historical thinking not as a stable cognitive competence or a measurable learning outcome but as something that emerges, is sustained, or collapses in the moment-to-moment organization of talk. Drawing on linguistic ethnography and discourse-analytic methods, the analysis traces how students organize participation, negotiate stance and epistemic authority, and deploy linguistic and discourse resources as they attempt to engage in historically oriented talk. The findings show that interactional engagement and collaboration do not necessarily align with the successful enactment of historical thinking: even in cohesive and participatory discussions, historical thinking may remain temporally flattened, conceptually underspecified, or be abandoned under interactional and linguistic constraints. A central contribution of the study is to demonstrate that engaging students in historical thinking in a foreign language classroom requires expanding prevailing notions of language beyond structural accuracy or symbolic meaning alone. Historical thinking depends on language as an interactional and epistemic resource through which disciplinary practices are collaboratively accomplished; this study makes visible how those practices are organized-and limited-in peer interaction. By illuminating how students use language to do (or fail to do) historical work together, the study offers practice-near insights for foreign language pedagogy, teacher education, and curriculum design, emphasizing the need to attend not only to what historical content is introduced but to how students are supported in using language to engage with it as a disciplinary problem in interaction

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: A.

Advisors: Pomerantz, Anne Committee members: Reisman, Avishag; Moore, Robert

Ed.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798252430768

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license