The discourse of historiography in CLIL history textbooks

CLIL is the acronym coined by professors David Marsh and Anne Maljers and it stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning. It describes a well-known and widespread methodology in Europe and in the Italian school system which was officially recognised in 1994. The current Italian school legislation has adopted it both to increase SL practice and to promote learner-centred approaches and teaching innovation. The Italian publishing industry has started to dedicate much attention to the development of ready-made supports for high school teachers and fix 'canonical' topics. Following the recent analyses of authorial voice in the academic discourse of historiography (Bondi 2007; 2009; 2012; 2014; 2017) and the applications of corpus linguistics/stylistics and appraisal theory to different textual typologies (White 2002; Martin and White 2005), this article aims at exploring the seemingly marginal textuality produced for CLIL history teaching. It constitutes an attempt at tracing stances of authorial voice in a corpus of 23 titles representing the totality of CLIL history textbooks adopted in the fifth year of Italian Licei and Istituti Tecnici throughout Italy. This corpus will be analysed with the aid of databases belonging to the most important and 'CLIL-involved' Italian publishers of schoolbooks and CLIL booklets (among others, Mondadori Scuola, Einaudi Scuola, Laterza Scolastica and more). The discourse analysis conducted on the texts will attempt at highlighting how the authors' different approaches to and viewpoints on contemporary history are conveyed linguistically in English, which in most cases is not their native language.