BY FOSTERING ARGUMENTATIVE SPEECH
3. MAIN PHASES OF THE INSTRUCTIONAL TREATMENT
The first phase of the treatment was principally aimed at providing the motivational ground for the successive phases, i.e., at providing students with the conditions as- sumed most likely to enhance their autonomous, self-motivated attitude towards any
instructional activity which they would be asked to participate in subsequently. They were invited to choose a few issues which they would be interested in talking about;
they were then presented with the transcription of those sequences which were judged most suitable to be examined according to the principle of relevance to the addressees’ viewpoint. In this phase, any instructional artefact was avoided. The only instructional goal was to make all students likely to store in their episodic memory both the items of communicational experience which they reflected upon and the outcomes of their self-evaluation, so that the later phase activities could be founded on them.
The following example illustrates how this stage encouraged the students to monitor their argumentation in order to adapt it to the addressee’s viewpoint. In a class discussion about whether it is acceptable to allow a homosexual couple to adopt a child, two students express their position (against and for, respectively) in a fragmentary and unclear way.
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Katja: Does it seem to you that a child... who lives for example with two women or with two men, and goes to school... then you see... but mum and dad, why does that one have a mum and dad of different sexes, and I have two of the same sex?
Kim: But you can make him understand...
Katja: No! You see?... Because when the child goes out of his home, he’ll go to school and he’ll be the one who’s different, he’ll be... in my opinion this child will also suffer some psychological damage
The information presented as argument is not linked to the students’ claims, and the information presented as counter-argument is not explicitly referred to the ad- dressee’s opposing viewpoint. In the collective analysis in the classroom, the stu- dents, encouraged by the experimenter’s responses, realise that their utterances pre- vented reciprocal comprehension of their viewpoint and complete them by making their respective discourses more relevant to each other’s arguments.
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Experimenter: Here, Katja, you respond to Kim
Katja: Yes, I respond to her alright!... In short, I shut her up Kim: Yes, because she didn’t let me speak
Experimenter: She didn’t let you speak
Kim: Yes, I meant that you can make the child understand... by talking to him, you see... that there’s nothing strange if two people of the same sex live together, and that he doesn’t have to feel different because of that
Katja: I wanted to say that for me that’s not the way it is, since the child will feel different from other children because his parents are homosexuals, and he won’t be able to understand
Experimenter: You don’t think he’ll understand
Katja: No, and maybe the other children will sneer at him too because of his par- ents and he’ll suffer
In her analysis, Kim (utterance 5) completes her discourse by referring explicitly to her idea of talking with the child, which she had not explained in the previous dis- cussion: this statement is a rebuttal of the addressee’s viewpoint, as it implies that the child can understand and accept the relationship between his/her parents. Katja (utterance 6), on the other hand, supports her own claim about the psychological damage suffered by the child adopted by a homosexual couple by presenting it as a consequence of the other children’s reactions.
The second phase, too, was centred on the oral production of argumentation. Here too, we applied the approach defined and proved by Lumbelli & Camagni (1993) and based on the assumption that a more direct and effective influence on thought strategies can be obtained by focussing on oral production and postponing the pas- sage to writing. Students, divided in small groups of three or four, were invited to plan an argumentative oral discourse suited to an addressee with an opposing stance on a determined topic, chosen by the students themselves in the first phase and re- formulated by the experimenter in the initial instruction. They were then asked to find possible arguments and counter-arguments and evaluate them by applying the criterion of their suitability to that addressee’s viewpoint. The problem-situation was enriched with further elements which could be processed in order to find the possi- ble path to the solution, i.e., counter-argumentation suited to the addressee’s stance.
These elements consisted of a set of short texts on that specific issue which could be skimmed through for possible premises of suitable arguments and counter- arguments. The students were invited to think aloud and were encouraged to further complete their spontaneous initial think-aloud protocols by experimenter feedback systematically centred on those protocols (Rogers, 1951; Lumbelli, 1996). The small number of students enabled the experimenter occasionally to pay attention to each of their thought efforts as much as in an individualised session.
The following example illustrates how this stage of the project encouraged the students to conceive their argumentation taking into account the addressee’s oppos- ing viewpoint. Katja argues that the USA offers more opportunities for social mobil- ity than European countries, but she has just found information about the inequality of job opportunities between WASPs and other ethnic groups.
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Katja: It’s true... that the WASPs have all the power and so on... but in my opin- ion it depends on the individual, despite the fact that there are some conditions that may help or not
Experimenter: If I’ve understood you properly, you’re saying that you think it de- pends on the individual whether he has opportunities or not
Katja: As I’ve already said, I accept most of what my addressee says, but he has not considered the individual in himself, he has always considered the masses Experimenter: You say that he has always considered the masses
Katja: Because what emerges from the passages is that it’s true that the lower classes have few opportunities for social mobility
Experimenter: So what you’re saying is that you agree with some of the things he says but it seems to you that they haven’t considered the individual, but the masses
Katja: Yes, in my opinion, there are some factors that may or may not help the individual but it depends a lot on him
Experimenter: What you’re saying is that there are some factors that limit the in- dividual, but that a lot still depends on him
Katja: Yes... I think that if someone from a lower class really wants to change his social position he can... even though he won’t make much progress, but most people think it’s very difficult to change and so they stay in the same class
After a moment’s hesitation, the student spontaneously proposes a distinction be- tween the masses and individual (utterance 1). The experimenter’s feed-back (utter- ance 2) encourages the student to better formulate the distinction in order to use it as a counter-argumentation more suited to the addressee’s standpoint (utterance 3).
Then, the student takes the opposing viewpoint explicitly into account (utterance 5) and supports (utterances 7 and 9) her counter-argument by defining the conditions suitable for making her position acceptable. By the end of the interaction, she was able to autonomously adapt her argumentation to the opposing viewpoint, just by being encouraged by the experimenter to keep thinking.
In the third phase, a special form of observational learning was provided (Couzijn & Rijlaarsdam, 1996) in which the experimenter became a reader model (Schriver, 1992) of argumentative text processing. The main function of this phase was to help students organise the knowledge stored in the previous phases, and make explicit all that which was likely to be implicit and/or not consciously monitored.
The emphasis shifted from learner self-regulation to the acquisition of rules and principles for correct and effective argumentation. Newspaper articles written by expert authors were used as instructional material. The experimenter read each suc- cessive piece of text and verbalised both his own comprehension processes and his evaluation of the suitability of arguments and counter-arguments expressed there; at the end, he recapitulated the argumentative strategies used in the text, the evaluation outcomes and supplied a formal definition of the criteria already introduced less formally in the previous stages.