James Woodcock, 'Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their causal reasoning' in Teaching History 119: Language issue (June, 2005)

In this subtle article, James Woodcock experiments with introducing new vocabulary to a mixed-ability year 10 class working towards the enquiry question '"Hitler was not to blame for World War II." To what extent do you agree with this statement?'  Woodcock weighs up whether the new terminology to which pupils are introduced helps them to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or whether it actually gives them new ideas which they had not encountered or thought of before.  For example, he finds that the historical term 'cause' that is so often used in history teaching can actually hinder pupils' understanding about reasoning about causes.   Woodcock contends that 'cause' is too simple a term.  It has too many different uses to do justice to the true complexity of explaining the twisted patterns of occurrences that lead to a particular event.  In his article, he describes how:

• Pupils study factual knowledge about the causes of appeasement in depth, becoming more familiar with them and rehearsing the deployment of their knowledge in support of an argument.
• Pupils are introduced to and learn to understand and use new terminology.  This allows them to articulate their thinking more effectively and introduces them to new ideas.
• Pupils' understanding of the concept of what constitutes a cause and the ideas that go with it are deepened and can be used again with other content.
• All of the above result in better writing by pupils as their understanding of factual knowledge, causation and vocabulary have all improved.