Oral Argumentation Skills between Process and Product

Abstract

Oral argumentation skills have become a ‘hot topic’ within pragmatic language acquisition research as well as didactical research. In this study, we first discuss characteristics specific to oral argumentation which, compared to written argumentation, has its own mediality and therefore specific requirements. To reconstruct different levels of oral argumentation skills of school children in grades 2, 4 and 6, we collected a corpus of 180 peer discussions without adult supervision and analyzed them based on conversation analysis. In our case study we compare two conversations in terms of different modalizations and epistemic stances in positionings and justifications and briefly show how the use of modalizations can shape both the character as well as the argumentative structure of a conversation. We argue that process-related and stylistic conversational aspects beyond structural aspects in a narrow sense shape oral argumentation to a high degree and therefore belong to the core aspects of oral argumentation skills.

Oral argumentation and language-aware civic education – a theoretical proposal

“…Oral argumentation is an interactively created activity (Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth 2022) and differs from written argumentation. Parallelism, simultaneity and cooperative creation, are central features of oral argumentation.…”

“…In written argumentation, in contrast, these processes are time-delayed (Becker-Mrotzek, 2009). Being spontaneously and cooperatively produced, individual utterances in oral arguments may appear less complex, incomplete, linguistically inadequately elaborated, or even unrecognizable as an argument (Becker-Mrotzek, 2009;Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth, 2022;Mundwiler et al, 2017). By contrast, written argumentation is ideally internally consistent and complexly elaborated regarding content, structure and language (Mundwiler et al, 2017;Spiegel 2011).…”

“…The purpose of oral argumentation in the educational context more broadly and in civic education in particular moves between persuasion or competition on the one hand and reaching consensus or exploration on the other hand (Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth, 2022;Felton, Garcia-Mila & Gilabert, 2009;Rapanta et al, 2013). In persuasive argumentation, interlocutors' aim is to convince their opponents of their own perspective.…”

“…justifying one's own position, responding to criticism, and further developing owns' and others' ideas. The quality of interactional behaviour concerns gestures, facial expressions, voice delivery, perspective taking, and the willingness to listen to others (Gronostay, 2019;Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth, 2022).…”

Argumentation Skill Assessment for Diagnosing Students' Understanding of Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, and Metacognitive Knowledge: Characteristics of Initial Needs

“…In addition, different trends of changing argumentation skills are identified as having scientific misconceptions and conceptions. (Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth, 2022) show oral argumentation skills compared to written argumentation to reconstruct various levels of oral argumentation skills with processes and styles beyond the structural aspect in the narrow sense of forming oral argumentation to a higher level. Argumentation skills can be achieved if the integration skills established during formal school education can facilitate the integration of all knowledge (Hacıeminoğlu & Yıldız, 2022).…”