Terminological choice to talk about the Chilean military coup and dictatorship in history textbooks between 2002 and 2014

This article presents a study about the terminology used to refer to the Chilean military coup and dictatorship in high school History textbooks. Terms represent specialised concepts in a specific subject field and reflect the conceptualisation of reality of a given disciplinary community in a socio-temporal context. Term choice influences how readers access specialised knowledge. This study aimed at analysing the point of view about the military coup and dictatorship conveyed by term choice in Chilean history textbooks; and determine whether this point of view changed across time. For that purpose, the term variants referring to the main concepts of the historical period were analysed in a corpus of history textbooks distributed by the Chilean Ministry of Education between 2002 and 2014 to students in second and third year of secondary education. A semantic analysis was carried out, which took into account the conceptual information, the abstraction level of the categories and the point of view (positive, negative or neutral) reflected by term variants. Results showed that terminology remains quite stable throughout the years and convey mainly a neutral perspective about the historical events. These results are not coherent with the pluralist perspective recommended by the Ministry of Education in the curriculum guidelines.