Teaching Students to Work with the Lexicon of Historical Texts

Abstract

This work is aimed at explaining to students how to navigate the lexicon of textual heritage in order to better comprehend language, culture, and history. A great number of historical texts contain idiomatic expressions or words that refer to culture or geographical region unknown to the recipient and thus are seen as an obstacle to understanding or interpretation. Although the significance of such texts in historical and linguistics is realized more and more, there is a lack of studying practical strategies for teaching historical lexicon. As thus, a mixed methods design for a series of class experiments with qualitative interviews and pretest-posttests were conducted. The adopted teaching framework comprised contextual analysis the historical background studies and the comparative linguistic analysis. Technological and collaborative theoretical resources in the learning process were combined to engage the students and encourage interaction. Outcome data show that this way the efficiency of the students’ analysis and interpretation of historical texts is increased significantly. The general from the respondents was encouraging as students exhibited improved lexical knowledge and a positive improvement in their scores for critical thinking aptitude. Further, they enhanced cultural-sentimental and historical understandings of these texts Concerning these findings, there is a need for implementing advanced interdisciplinary and interactivity approach to the teaching of historical lexicon. The research can prove helpful for teachers developing educational programs that coordinate the use of language and history. It also stresses the possibilities of extending the use of these approaches among individuals of different languages and cultural backgrounds for improved learning outcomes of a various population group of students. Future works should examine these problematics with special regard to the multilingual or specialized historical settings.