Linguistics and Education 24 (2013) 38–49 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Linguistics and Education j o ur nal ho me p age : www.elsevier.com/locate/linged Time travel: The role of temporality in enabling semantic waves in secondary school teaching Erika Matruglio * , Karl Maton, J.R. Martin The University of Sydney, Australia a r t i c l e i n f o Available online 29 December 2012 Keywords: Legitimation Code Theory Systemic functional linguistics Temporality History Semantic gravity Semantic density a b s t r a c t Based on the theoretical understandings from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 2013) underpinning the research discussed in this special issue, this paper focuses on classroom pedagogy to illustrate an important strategy for making semantic waves in History teaching, namely temporal shifting. We begin with a brief contextualisation of how Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic Functional Linguistics have been used together to investigate cumulative knowledge-building before outlining how the LCT concepts of semantic gravity and semantic density were enacted in linguistic terms for this research in order to understand the linguistic resources marshalled by actors in making semantic waves. The paper then moves on to consider temporality from both linguistic and sociological perspectives and to demonstrate how it is implicated in movements up and down the semantic scale to create semantic waves. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. 1. Introduction When it comes to cumulative knowledge-building, time is of the essence. Time is, of course, implicated in the very notion of cumulative knowledge-building, which involves both looking backwards to previous ideas and looking forwards to future contexts in which current knowledge can be applied and extended. However, this is but one facet of the role of temporality in cumulative pedagogic practice. Maton (2013) highlights the significance for knowledge-building of making ‘semantic waves’ in the knowledge being expressed in classroom discourse (as well as other practices). These semantic waves involve recurrent movements in the ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’ of knowledge, or (simply put) the context-dependence and condensation of meaning (see Section 3, below). As we shall discuss, time travel or shifting the temporal and spatial coordinates of discussion, can be a key pedagogic strategy for making semantic waves and thereby enabling recontextualization of knowledge. In particular, strategies aimed at metaphorically locating students in the time of the historical context being discussed can be used in the classroom to enable students to traverse the distance created by texts situated in unfamiliar contexts and which use condensed and archaic language. That is, they enable knowledge to be recontextualised: from historical contexts to current classroom contexts; and from complex constellations of historical meanings into simpler current meanings. Such strategies thereby involve changes in semantic gravity and semantic density, making semantic waves in order to build cumulative knowledge. This research is part of a larger inter-disciplinary project which investigates the question of how better to enable cumu- lative teaching in schooling by using approaches from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) in tandem. The Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling (DISKS) project (Freebody et al., 2008) continues the long and fruitful dialogue between SFL and the tradition of code theory from the sociology of education which began with discussions * Corresponding author at: 10 Weemala Ave, Riverwood NSW 2210, Australia. Tel.: +61 0423 952 388. E-mail address: erika.matruglio@sydney.edu.au (E. Matruglio). 0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.007