Construction of causality in Turkish history textbooks

Studies on the linguistic resourcesfor making historical meaning reveal that causality is one of the key concepts in this field. Studies also reveal that history textbooks display the use of narrative, explanatory and argumentative text types, and that these text types can be identified by analyzing the frequency of lexico-grammatical and logico-semantic patterns used in a text. Furthermore, studies conducted on history texbooks exhibit a taxonomic relationship between the stages in secondary schooling and the text type use: in the earlier years history texts are constructed as narration; whereas in the later years they are replaced increasingly by explanation and argumentation.This study investigates the types of lexico-grammatical and logico-semantic patterns used in the construction of causality, their functions and the possible correlation between frequency of these patterns and the stages in the secondary school curriculum. Our data of analysis consist of the texts randomly chosen from the Turkish history textbooks studied in years VIII and XI in the secondary school curriculum. The findings reveal that lexico-grammatical and logico-semantic patterns used in the year VIII construct causality between the events in the history text-externally, taking the time line into consideration and they are organized as historical recount and historical account sub-text types of the narrative; whereas in the year XI, the causal relations are constructed ignoring the time line and paying more attention to text-internal organization. The texts at this stage mainly bear explanatory and argumentative linguistic resources for making historical meaning. The result of our research correlates with the previous studies in that there is a taxonomic relationship between the text type and the progress through secondary school curriculum.