Educational Discourse and Argumentation. Strategies in the Construction of Disciplinary ethos in the Social Sciences

Abstract

In this paper, we study some linguistic strategies that contribute to the
configuration of a discursive ethos (Ducrot, 1984; Amossy, 1999) in a Social Sciences textbook written in Spanish. Based on a corpus of secondary school textbooks published in Argentina between 2004 and 2006, we analyze person cues and different authorship roles (Tang y John, 1999), as well as a discursive mechanism used recurrently in these types of textbooks that we name as “signaling system”. The function of this system is to assist a layperson addressee in its reading processes. From our analysis we show that, on the one hand, the prevalence of impersonal strategies configures explanations presented as objective and neutral, both genre-characteristic claims. On the other hand, we find that the high frequency of personalizing resources, added to the roles of guide and pedagogue frequently assumed by the author, show the concerns within the field to help the reader to understand the explanations presented. We conclude that the ethos of Social Sciences textbooks evidences a tension between academic and school discourse and, based on this tension, the ethos finds its specificity and models another particular pedagogic ethos.