Technical language support in the context of history lessons should be more than memorizing technical terms and acquisition of typical sentence patterns. Rather, it must succeed in exercising authentic historical speech actions. Such speech actions should be practiced in reference to their communicative functionality against the background of conventionalized communicative situations (such as in the context of technical text types) and accordingly establish technical mental routines. Based on these assumptions, the study on the one hand is dedicated to the empirical exploration of academic and technical language skills as well as historical knowledge of learners. On the other hand, potentials and limits of language-sensitive resp. language-forming history education are discussed.