The overarching aim of this text-analytical study is to provide a detailed investigation of how recently arrived adolescents engage with the discourse of the Swedish school subject of history, focusing on their written meaning-making. From the data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I have chosen thirteen texts written by five students and three texts written by their history teacher. The students’ texts assess their ability to apply source criticism, a core curricular goal of history as a subject. The teacher’s texts comprise test instructions and teaching materials.

The examination of the study is three-fold: it examines the verbal linguistic resources students use for meaning-making in history, and the complexity of subject content. Furthermore, this allows for a subsequent understanding of the interaction between verbal language and content in demonstrating source-critical skills.

Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the students’ meaning-making is analysed using the experiential and logical systems of language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a framework rooted in the sociology of education, is applied to examine the complexity inherent in subject matter as it is enacted in words and the ways this complexity is condensed within texts.

The investigation’s key findings reveal that a small set of formal concepts suffices for students to conduct and articulate source-critical investigations using established criteria. Formal concepts, combined with empirical descriptions, clarify, present, and justify subject content, which is further reinforced by explicit textual connections. The study also illustrates and highlights how linguistic resources interact with subject content of varying epistemic complexity and condensation.

Theoretically, the study integrates two equally important and mutually reinforcing theoretical and analytical frameworks – SFL and LCT – to advance the understanding of how recently arrived adolescents develop disciplinary writing in history. Methodologically, it emphasises the importance of perspective selection when analysing verbal language resources in the categorisation of process meanings and logical meaning relations. Notably, this study marks a first in Sweden by operationalising the analysis of epistemic complexity and condensation in a national context and for examining co-occurrences of language and content.

The results of the study are significant for early subject teaching in language introduction programs, as they highlight opportunities for multilingual students to develop both their language and subject knowledge. Additionally, the study provides teachers with a focus on student texts as a basis for collaboration, enabling them to effectively support student learning.