Promoting written historical reasoning among undergraduate L2 students

This dissertation studies L2 tertiary students’ written historical reasoning in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course using a cognitive apprenticeship model. These two models have potential to support L2 students' historical reasoning, but have not previously been studied together. This dissertation first explored students' oral and written source evaluation, finding that students demonstrated an emerging level of proficiency while sourcing. Next, we investigated the relationship between students' source-based writing over the duration of the historical reasoning course and their level of reading and writing proficiency in English. Students' written historical reasoning improved significantly during the course regardless of their reading and writing proficiency. The third study explored the relationship between students' epistemic beliefs in history and their performance in written historical reasoning. We found a relationship between students' epistemic beliefs about historical methodology and their written historical reasoning. Additional task-based interviews showed a possible relationship between their epistemic stance and their approach in a historical reasoning task. The final quasi-experimental study investigated an intervention focusing on written historical contextualization. Both control and experimental group students demonstrated growth in written historical reasoning. Students in the experimental group were significantly better than the students in the control group when writing claims, but not when contextualizing. A subsequent analysis pointed to qualitative differences between the groups in terms of contextualizing, resulting in proposed changes to the scoring method. These studies demonstrate the strong potential of a combined CLIL and cognitive apprenticeship approach in promoting written historical reasoning among L2 students.