Metadiscourse in Oral Discussions and Persuasive Essays in Collaborative Reasoning Groups

• In Event: Poster Session 4
  In Poster Session: Language Instruction and Assessment

Abstract

The study examines and compares metadiscourse in argumentative free-flowing story-based discussions of 107 fourth-graders who participated in Collaborative Reasoning small-group conversational paradigm with their reflective essays. Comparative analysis involving 9 major categories and 40 metadiscursal subcategories revealed that CR-exposed girls add more caution, hearsay evidentials and hypothetical scenarios into their talks. Children from a rural location organized talk by establishing intersubjectivity (solidarity), adding caution and hearsay evidentials that boost logical and ethical appeals and cogency of arguments. Whereas, urban school-children utilized more talk-organizing and talk-evaluating metadiscourse. Comparisons between ethnic groups revealed that European-Americans used more if-then inferencing structures, speech acts and textual connectives while African-Americans’ arguments were bound by simple additives and utilized emphatic repetition and hypothetical scenarios.

Authors

• Beata M. Latawiec, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Richard C. Anderson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign