Composing Literary Arguments in an 11th-Grade International Baccalaureate Classroom: How Instructional Conversations Shape Writing

• In Event: 31.037 - Writing Research, Intervention, and Practice

Abstract

To study argumentative writing in the context of a high school International Baccalaureate (IB) English classroom, this paper examines a series of literacy events and emergent written literary arguments among four high school students. This inquiry was directed by the question, what were the key events during an instructional unit that shaped students’ writerly moves in speaking and in writing when making literary arguments? A move analyses of student writing and discourse analysis of instructional events revealed that the teacher offered “possible” moves for her students’ that permitted her students to enact their moves suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grade levels.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Theresa Thanos, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Subeom Kwak, The Ohio State University - Columbus