Search results for "Argumentative"
showing 10 items of 46 documents
Commenting on Written Arguments as a Part of Argumentation Skills — comparison between students engaged in traditional vs on‐line study
1992
ABSTRACT The use of computer‐mediated communication (CMC) has increased in the area of education. This article reports a study whose aim was to improve the argumentation and scientific thinking skills of university students through argumentative on‐line studying. The research problems dealt on the one hand with learning outcomes in terms of subject content and on the other hand with argumentation skills. The results were compared between on‐line students and students who studied in a traditional way. The results indicated that the traditional group got better learning outcomes than the on‐line students who, by contrast, succeeded better in the tasks of argumentation skills. The findings sug…
Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland
2019
This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claimmaking and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, and the Save Women committee that stood behind the ‘black’ protests opposing the project. The textual material is drawn from social media profiles of the two movements following a week of intense street protests and publicity activities (19–26 October…
Argumentative reasoning and taxonomic analysis for the identification of medical errors
2015
Telemedicine consists of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the practice of medicine. The massive digitalisation of the society is changing the behaviour of ordinary people even in medical sectors. The impact of digitisation is also having impacts on teleexpertise, where a medical professional can remotely ask some advices through the use of ICTs to provide treatment to a patient in critical conditions in remote environment. However, sometimes the outcome of such advice obtained remotely can lead to medical errors. In these situations, it is important to determine whether the causes of the errors could have been avoidable or not for the purposes of establishing …
Investigating Syntactic Complexity in EFL Learners' Writing across Common European Framework of Reference Levels A1, A2, and B1
2019
Abstract The study investigates the linguistic basis of Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing. Specifically, it examines whether CEFR levels can be distinguished with reference to syntactic complexity (SC) and whether the results differ between two groups of EFL learners with different first languages (Sindhi and Finnish). This sheds light on the linguistic comparability of the CEFR levels across L1 groups. Informants were teenagers from Pakistan (N = 868) and Finland (N = 287) who wrote the same argumentative essay that was rated on a CEFR-based scale. The essays were analysed for 28 SC indices with the L2 Syntactic Co…
Problem Solving and Argumentative Skills in Multicultural Italian Classrooms.
2016
In the last decades the population in Italian classrooms has become increasing more multicultural. Even if the law guarantees to all students the access to school, the gap between Italian students and migrant ones is becoming more and more evident in the results of national surveys in Italian Language and Mathematics and in the high dropout rates. A preliminary investigation was carried out to highlight the main difficulties faced in mathematics by these students, particularly related to problem solving and argumentation. The research aimed therefore to the development and testing of an educational intervention that, taking into account cultural and linguistic differences, aims at strengthe…
La crisi del dibattito pubblico nell'Italia contemporanea: il discorso populista
2019
In this paper I discuss the current state of the so called populist political discourse in Italy. In particular my purpose is to shed light on some features of this kind of discourse in order to show the relation between language and policy in the discourse of populism. In this perspective I will follow the eight key points that, according to Diamanti & Lazar (2018), identify the actual populist movements, in order to verify if – and, in that case, which – linguistic traits characterize their discourse.The analysis will be focused on the semantic and argumentative aspects of the discourse of some of the most important political actors in contemporary Italy.
Secondary school students’ collaboration during dyadic debates face-to-face and through computer chat
2009
Communicative competence needed in today's constructive learning environments both in virtual and physical classrooms requires most of all critical and argumentative thinking skills as well as abilities to use reciprocal and collaborative language. This study clarifies the quality of secondary school students' collaboration in dyadic face-to-face and computer chat debates during argumentative discussions. The speech acts produced in 24 debates were first classified into either on-task or off-task categories. The on-task speech acts were then further classified into six collaborative and two non-collaborative categories. The students commonly presented questions and made requests for clarifi…
An experimental study on the effect of systemic functional linguistics applied through a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching writing
2016
Abstract In the tradition of teaching English as a second language, there has been an increased interest in how functional language descriptions and understandings of genres may be used as resources for making meaning. The present study investigates what impact writing instruction that draws upon systemic functional linguistics (SFL) applied through a genre-pedagogy approach has on students’ ability to write argumentative essays. This includes explicit grammar instruction inspired by SFL, as well as instruction on text structure. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, with a quasi-experiment followed up by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected material. Statistical analys…
A Civilization of Death: Argumentative and Rhetorical Strategies in the Catholic Church's Position on Biotechnology
2017
Although political deliberation rarely proceeds fairly and effectively (Habermas 1984, 1989), the author of this paper assumes the fundamentally deliberative nature of the democratic public sphere, in which different religious institutions may take a stance and argue either for or against certain legal solutions. The study examines argumentation behind the Catholic Church’s negative stance on biotechnologies such as, for example, in vitro fertilization (IVF). Drawing on the theoretical and descriptive work on normative assumptions, knowledge bases and argumentative patterns involved in practical reasoning (Perelman, Olbrechts- Tyteca 1969; Walton 1990; Fairclough, Fairclough 2010, 2012), as…
Computer‐based and Face‐to‐face Collaborative Argumentation in Secondary Schools in England and Finland
2005
Abstract This article focuses on the analysis of secondary school students’ argumentative interactions in England and Finland, within specific face‐to‐face and computer‐based environments. We propose that a combination of learning environments, in conjunction with teacher input and support, is important for developing argumentation skills in the classroom. Face‐to‐face argumentation, in particular, offers ample opportunity for concentrating on the quality (through deeper exploration) of arguments; such learning can enhance the construction of well‐structured arguments often associated with some computer‐based environments, such as synchronous computer chat.