Abstract
This paper aims at exploring the challenges arising when teachers at secondary school level decide to cooperate about students’ argumentative writing. Two teams of teachers and researchers have met regularly during the school year, discussing students’ texts from a variety of disciplines. Going into two writing tasks in detail, the authors discuss the importance of scaffolding (support) in the teaching of argument. The paper includes a discussion of some specific textual features that are often touched upon in the meetings.
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Notes
The three main competencies are functioning in socially heterogeneous groups, acting autonomously and using tools interactively (Rychen and Salganik 2002). It is the third one that points towards literacy.
QAL = Quality Assurance of Learning Outcome in Written Norwegian (see Berge et al. 2005).
Due to reasons that we will not go into here, the national writing test has been run only once (in 2005), but it will be revived in 2010 in the form of a test for a limited sample of the student cohort.
In Norway, primary school finishes at grade 7, lower secondary at grade 10 and upper secondary at grade 13. As lower and upper secondary are separated with only the first being compulsory, there is a school-leaving exam after lower secondary. However, most students continue to upper secondary, where they can choose between academic and vocational programs.
The names of the schools and the teachers are pseudonyms.
An opinion paper is a newspaper genre similar to “letter to the editor”. According to the criteria developed by The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, in an opinion paper one does not expect claims to be supported to the same degree as in an article. An opinion paper allows the student to show strong personal involvement and spontaneity, and the argumentation may be one-sided. According to Freedman and Pringle (1989) it would be classified as a typical persuasive text.
The translations of all text extracts are done by the researchers. Spelling mistakes are difficult to translate, but we have tried to keep the original punctuation and word parsing.
The student uses the English abbreviation for Human Development Index.
Save the Children’s Norwegian web site.
We would like to thank professor in Law Jon T. Johnsen for helping us translate these two extracts.
In a typical open book-exam students receive a topic 48 h in advance, and on the day of the exam they are allowed to bring along all sources except for Internet and translation programmes.
For the main findings see http://kiap.uib.no/index-e.htm.
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Øgreid, A.K., Hertzberg, F. Argumentation in and Across Disciplines: Two Norwegian Cases. Argumentation 23, 451–468 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9162-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9162-y