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The current research in the field of argumentation in school contexts predominantly focuses on the development of oral and written argumentation skills and interventions to improve students’ argumentative skills, while comparative studies of argumentative practices in different modes, particularly the linguistic features of oral versus written argumentative practices, are still rare.
To close this gap, our study investigates argumentative oral and written practices of students in secondary school to answer the question whether the mode has an influence on the use of specific procedures and linguistic features. We examined how students express their stance on a controversial issue linguistically (Positionierung) by analyzing a small corpus of argumentative discussions and letters by 12th grade students. The results of the study show that while students use similar procedures and linguistic features in both modes, they are more varied and multifaceted in discussions, i.e. oral communication, than in letters, i.e. written communication.
We report on a study on syllogistic reasoning conceived with the idea that subjects' performance in experiments is highly dependent on the communicative situations in which the particular task is framed. From this perspective, we describe the results of Experiment 1 comparing the performance of undergraduate students in 5 different tasks. This between-subjects comparison inspires a within-subject intervention design (Experiment 2). The variations introduced on traditional experimental tasks and settings include two main dimensions. The first one focuses on reshaping the context (the pragmatics of the communication situations faced) along the dimension of cooperative vs. adversarial attitudes. The second one consists of rendering explicit the construction/representation of counterexamples, a crucial aspect in the definition of deduction (in the classical semantic sense). We obtain evidence on the possibility of a significant switch in students' performance and the strategies they follow. Syllogistic reasoning is seen here as a controlled microcosm informative enough to provide insights and we suggest strategies for wider contexts of reasoning, argumentation and proof.