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Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
NNS students’ arguments in English:
Observations in formal and informal contexts
Antonia Chandrasegaran *
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616, Singapore
Abstract
The ability to construct supported arguments in English is important for academic success in educational
contexts where English is the language of instruction and student assessment is mediated through the
academic essay. Starting from the hypothesis that students schooled in an English-medium education system
do engage in friendly argument in English with peers, this paper inquires into the question of whether
argument practices displayed in friendly interaction would be reflected in some form in formal academic
writing that calls for the reasoned projection of a point of view. Students’ texts from two discourse situations,
one informal and the other formal, were studied for the presence of three argument practices: stance
assertion moves, stance support moves, and the rhetorical use of topic knowledge in argument support.
Move analysis revealed that the informal arguments featured fairly sophisticated stance assertion and
support moves that included the rhetorical deployment of available topic knowledge. While argument in the
formal text, specifically an academic essay, featured stance assertion and support moves, deployment of
topic knowledge for stance support was executed with less directness. The pedagogical implications of these
findings are discussed to consider means of building on students’ friendly argument practices with the goal
of developing competencies in argument construction for academic writing tasks.
# 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Argument in student writing; Argument in online forum; Teaching expository writing; Academic writing
Introduction
The argument that students’ out-of-school literacy practices should be given value in school
settings has been advanced by literacy scholars with an interest in non-schooled literacies
(Kramer-Dahl, 2005; Street, 1997). Street’s (1997) recommendation that schools value the
literacy practices students bring into the classroom raises the possibility that there may be out-of-
* Tel.: +65 67903393.
E-mail address: antonia.c@nie.edu.sg.
1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2008.04.003
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A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
school literacy competencies that can be harnessed in the classroom for the development of
thinking and writing skills for academic purposes. If students participate in non-classroom
activities that involve oral discourse and reading/writing processes, the knowledge and skills they
exercise in these activities may be relevant to school-based reading and writing tasks. We should
therefore be sufficiently interested in students’ out-of-school literacy behaviours as to inquire
into their nature and their potential role in classroom lessons aimed at developing academic
writing skills.
Argument in friendly interaction is one form of social behaviour that may involve discourse
practices that are relevant to classroom writing tasks that call for the adoption and development of
a writer position on a topic or issue. The texts produced in such tasks belong to the category of
writing referred to as expository writing, which has been defined as texts that state a point of view
or thesis that is subsequently developed through arguments (Rothery, 1996; Schleppegrell, 2004).
Going by this definition, argument in the sense of advancing and developing a point of view is
expected from students in many school- and university-based academic writing tasks, an
expectation not limited to argumentative essays. Many school and university-based expository
writing tasks, while not expressly argumentative in the sense of requiring the adversarial defence
of a personal point of view against an opposing view, call for construction of a network of related
supporting claims aimed at enhancing the acceptability of the writer’s stance on a topic or issue
(e.g., a book review written for the English composition teacher, a master’s degree student’s
research proposal). In this paper, the term ‘‘academic writing’’ is used with the meaning of
‘‘expository writing’’ and includes the argumentative essay and any writing in which a thesis or
point of view is sustained through acts of interpreting, arguing, and persuading, acts recognised
as genre practices in academic writing (Woodward-Kron, 2002). Since support of a point of view
is intrinsic to expository writing, the discourse practices of stance assertion and stance support in
argument in informal contexts could play a role in the development of students’ academic writing
competence.
This paper examines excerpts of Singapore students’ friendly argument to discover if there are
discourse moves that can be honed for argument construction in expository essay writing. It then
examines a student’s academic essay to observe the transformations, if any, that the discourse acts
of friendly argument may undergo when enacted in the formal context of the academic essay. The
aim of studying argument practices in the two different contexts is to explore the question of how
writing teachers might harness students’ expertise in friendly argument for the purpose of
developing competence in expository essay writing. What adjustments to oral, informal stance
taking or stance support acts, for instance, need to be taught so that students can project a
consistent stance in an academic essay?
The motivation for studying students’ informal arguments came from Singapore teachers’
reports of the challenges of teaching expository/argumentative essay writing in secondary school.
These were secondary school English language teachers who attended an in-service course I have
been conducting for four years on the teaching of expository writing. A recurrent thread in their
sharing of classroom experience may be summed up in the oft-heard statement: ‘‘My students
can’t argue’’ which, on further inquiry, usually refers to the non-elaboration or inadequate
elaboration of argumentation claims, including the use of topic knowledge for elaborating and
supporting claims (i.e., Students do not have the knowledge).
The teachers’ perception that their students ‘‘can’t argue’’ raises the need for verification.
Students in an English medium education system such as Singapore’s who use English in and
outside the classroom for peer interaction must, at times, engage in friendly argument with each
other, possibly enacting the argument moves of stance assertion and stance support since,
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
239
according to Schiffrin (1985), these are characteristic acts whenever individuals advance and
support disputable or disputed positions. Perhaps these moves exist in students’ informal
arguments but are not evident in their expository essays in a form recognisable by teachers as
valued practices of written argument. A close examination of students’ informal arguments is
needed to determine if they enact the defining argumentation discourse practices of stance
assertion and stance support and, if they do, how these practices are constructed. If students’
informal arguments have stance assertion and stance support moves, we would expect some
semblance of these acts to appear in their academic essays. A scrutiny of students’ academic
essays would reveal if the discourse practices of informal argument are deployed and how they
are deployed in argument in the formal context of school-based writing. Furthermore, since
interactants in argument typically rely on their store of topic knowledge as a source of grounds or
evidence for stance support, we would expect students to put their knowledge of the topic to
rhetorical use whether they are engaged in friendly argument or in the more formal argument of
academic writing.
The need for evidence of the nature of students’ discourse practices in argument motivated the
analysis of students’ formal and informal arguments reported in this paper. The analysis was
guided by three specific questions:
1. Are there stance assertion and stance maintenance moves in the text studied?
2. If there is stance support, what strategies of support are evident?
3. Is topic knowledge put to rhetorical use in stance support instead of appearing to be merely
recounted?
Findings from studying argument moves in students’ friendly interaction and in academic
essays could have useful implications for the teaching of academic writing at school and
university. The observation that the knowledge students bring into the classroom is little used or
valued by teachers (Austin, Dwyer, & Freebody, 2003) suggests that students’ social discourse
skills hold potential waiting to be tapped by teachers interested in improving their students’
academic writing competence. Informal argument practices might, for instance, be harnessed in
writing lessons to show students how to augment their existing argumentation skills to align with
the conventions of argument in academic essay writing. This and other possible pedagogical
implications of the results in the current study are discussed in the final section. But before that, in
the sections immediately following this introduction, the theoretical framework of the study is set
out, previous studies on students’ academic writing are briefly reviewed, the method of move
analysis is explained, and the findings relating to argument moves are reported.
Academic writing from a socio-cultural perspective
The theoretical perspective of writing adopted in this paper is the view that sees literacy
(reading and writing) as social practice, one that is ‘‘always embedded in socially constructed
epistemological principles’’ (Street, 2001, p. 7). In the context of students’ writing in academic
settings, writing as social practice involves conscious or sub-conscious knowledge of the
normative writer-reader interaction practices of the academic discourse community. The
normative discourse practices include discipline-specific cultural attitudes towards knowledge
and ways of using book knowledge to construct and sustain writer positions. Viewing writing as
social practice does not deny that there are cognitive processes involved in writing and reading,
but these are ‘‘concomitants of what is a social activity’’ (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 3). The
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A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
thinking processes that drive effective writing are shaped by the conventional textual practices
and value system of the discourse community in which the written text will be read and judged.
Viewed as a social activity with a set of conventional textual practices, expository writing in
academic settings is characterised by the social interaction acts of stance taking and stance
support. Asserting and justifying a stance are dominant practices in academic writing because
such writing is ‘‘a process of interpreting, arguing, criticizing, and . . . persuading the disciplinary
community to accommodate new claims’’ (Woodward-Kron, 2002, p. 516). The same process of
interpreting, arguing, and persuading is played out in informal interaction, whether face-to-face
or online, whenever the discourse features disputed or disputable topics. There are certainly
differences in the way argument is performed in oral friendly encounters and in formal written
academic essays, two significant areas of difference being metadiscourse—how writers engage
with readers (Hyland, 2005)—and type of acceptable evidence in claim-support. Nevertheless,
the point remains that the basic component acts in everyday argument and in the academic essay
are stance taking and stance support.
Theoretical views of writing influence approaches to the teaching of writing, an issue of
relevance here because this study was motivated by the question of whether students’ social
argument practices can play a role in the development of expository essay writing ability, a
question we will return to in Discussion section. From the theoretical perspective of writing as
social practice, the teaching of argumentative writing for academic functions should prioritise the
socialisation of students into the discourse behaviours valued by teachers and professors. To
expedite the process of socialisation into academic genres, explicit instruction of discourse
moves through articulation of the tacit, underlying value assumptions and explicit teaching of the
linguistic features for realising the conventions of the genre have been proposed and trialled in
classrooms (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Rothery, 1996). Recognised as part of the critical literacy
movement (Luke & Freebody, 1997), genre-based approaches to teaching writing have been
advocated for the promise they hold of empowering students for academic success through
explicit instruction that brings to conscious attention ‘‘dominant practices and foregrounds . . .
dimensions . . . which had previously remained invisible’’ (Lillis, 2006, p. 32). Despite the
scepticism of some literacy scholars who believe that socio-cultural practices in written discourse
cannot be taught (Freedman, 1994), the genre approach has won adherents among teachers owing
largely to the positive results of Australian studies (e.g., Richardson, 1994; Rothery & Stenglin,
2000) that investigated the application of the Australian school of genre theory in classroom
settings.
Argument practices in students’ academic writing
As noted in the introduction, many academic writing tasks involve the process of taking and
maintaining a stance on a topic or issue to persuade the reader to accept the writer’s stance as
reasonable. This section’s brief review of recent studies on students’ writing is aimed at building
a composite picture of the argument behaviours in student-generated expository texts. The papers
reviewed here are predominantly studies of the writing of non-native English speaking students,
the reason being that I have been drawn to such studies as some of the Singaporean students
participating in my study speak a language other than English outside the classroom.
Arguing may be a socially learnt skill that is acquired at an early age, a view suggested by
studies of children’s written arguments reviewed by Piolat, Roussey, and Gombert (1999). Piolat
et al. (1999) concluded in their review that before the age of twelve, children are capable of
writing arguments justifying their point of view though the ability to integrate counterargument
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
241
into their writing develops a little later at age thirteen or fourteen. A study of fifteen- to sixteenyear old Singapore students’ postings on a school online forum revealed arguments that included
fairly sophisticated counter-argument moves such as anticipating opposing views, and partial
concession of these views before a rebuttal (Chandrasegaran & Kong, 2006). Since these students
had not been explicitly taught the cognitive strategies and genre practices of argumentative
writing, one may conclude that their argument moves emerged from the exigency of peer-to-peer
social interaction over debatable topics that demanded the articulation and defence of a point of
view
Analyses of students’ expository essays have found discourse behaviours that vary somewhat
from the stance assertion and development moves reported in the studies referred to above. For
instance, moves that address opposing or alternative views, realised as counter-arguments in the
forum postings study (Chandrasegaran & Kong, 2006), appear in a different guise in Asian
students’ essays analysed by Hinkel (1999). Hinkel reports the practice of ‘‘setting up opposing
positions, making a statement, and then confuting it, as in Some people believe xxx, and others
think yyy’’ (p. 98). Counter-arguments were commonly acknowledged ‘‘in a sentence or a
phrase’’ (p. 99) without elaboration. The practice of setting up opposing positions may have its
roots in the emphasis school writing teachers place on ‘‘balance’’ in essays, a value reflected in
one Singapore teacher’s enthusing over ‘‘balanced arguments’’ as ‘‘a real treat’’ to read (Lee,
2006, p. 209). School writing lessons may have imprinted in students an interpretation of
‘‘balanced argument’’ that is limited to the mere statement of opposing views.
Another discourse practice observed in students’ expository writing is postponement of the
position or thesis statement. In a study of the academic writing of a Japanese master’s degree
history student at a British university, English (1999) observed that in an essay requiring an
assessment of the weight of reasons for a historical event, the student stated her assessment only
in the essay’s final paragraph. Preceding the assessment were paragraphs that appeared to her
tutor to be a listing of factors leading to the historical event but which, based on the contrastive
rhetoric studies of Hinds (1990), could be intended by the student to be her ‘‘reasons’’ in support
of her position.
From previous studies of students’ essays (Cai, 1999; English, 1999; Hinkel, 1999), we might
infer that students do use topic knowledge for essay development, although the manner in which
the knowledge is presented appears too much like mere recital to the reader expecting discourse
moves characteristic of the Anglo-American model of the academic essay. Topic knowledge took
the form of a listing of reasons leading to a historical event in the history essay by the student in
English’s (1999) study, presumably intended as support of the student’s evaluative stance, which
is stated in the essay’s concluding paragraph. The student in Cai’s (1999) study used book
knowledge of the French Revolution to suggest a claim about the origin of the concept of
equality. The college students in the two studies just referred to were writing in response to a
tutor-set task for a course with a set of prescribed reading texts. This context may have given rise
to the writer’s goal of demonstrating to the tutor evidence of having studied the course readings,
resulting in so much attention being channelled to topic knowledge that the intention to argue a
position is submerged. When writing is not tied to a teacher-imposed task, as in the writing of a
post-graduate thesis, the rhetorical use of topic knowledge may be more apparent, possibly due to
the influence of a personally felt argument goal arising from writing on a self-selected topic. In a
study of two post-graduate students’ moves in the discussion chapter of their theses,
Chandrasegaran (2001) found that both students, one of whom was a less competent writer than
the other, used their topic knowledge of previous research in the field for the purpose of validating
their own interpretive claims.
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Although the discourse behaviours reported above were observed in the texts of non-native
English speakers (NNES) – specifically, Asian student writers – similar observations have been
made in the texts of native English speakers (NES) (e.g., Flowerdew, 2001). A study of students’
argumentation practices in casual and formal situations could yield results with implications for
the teaching of expository writing to both NES and NNES students.
While studies of students’ academic writing have documented deviations from the discourse
behaviours regarded as conventional practices in Anglo-American expository writing (e.g., Cai,
1999; Chandrasegaran, 2001; English, 1999), little or no attention has been paid to the question of
whether informal arguments among students feature some version, at least, of the stance support
behaviours that are expected in expository essay writing. It is possible that verbal acts of
defending a personal stance on a disputed issue, including the rhetorical use of topic knowledge
as grounds for a stance, occur naturally in friendly argument but are not realised in formal
academic writing in a form that is recognisable to tutor-readers as stance support moves. It is
equally possible that schools’ disinterest in students’ literacy practices in out-of-class contexts
has built the belief among students that the argument practices of peer-to-peer interaction have no
place in formal expository essay writing. The potential usefulness of more knowledge of
students’ out-of-school discourse practices and the scarcity of investigations into student–student
interaction outside formal lessons (Austin, Dwyer, & Freebody, 2003) are reasons for the current
study, which seeks to examine the nature of argument acts in the friendly online forum postings of
a group of students. This study was carried out with the hope that the results, juxtaposed with
those from an examination of argument moves in a formal essay, would make some contribution
to discussion among writing researchers and teachers on the potential value of harnessing
students’ out-of-school discourse behaviours for the development of their writing competence.
Method
To study the nature of stance taking and stance development behaviours in students’
arguments in formal and informal contexts, two types of student-generated texts were analysed
for discourse moves in constructing stance and stance support. The texts for studying informal
argument moves consisted of messages posted by a group of Singapore secondary school
students on an online forum. Online forum postings were chosen because they provided a visible
written record of the dynamics of stance taking, stance challenge, and stance defence among a
group of students away from the judgemental presence of a teacher. The text for studying formal
moves was an academic essay written by a Singapore master’s student for a course assignment.
The choice of secondary school students’ forum postings served my primary objective of
inquiring into the potential use of out-of-class discourse practices for raising student competence
in school-based expository writing. The academic essay, however, had to be sourced from a
university course for the two reasons explained below.
Firstly, the secondary school students who participated in the online forum were rarely set
expository essay topics for English composition due to a preference among Singapore English
teachers of O-level classes for narrative topics. Although some teachers may be beginning to
appreciate the value of teaching expository writing as a result of changes in the English
examination paper, at the time of this study the preference for narrative topics was prevalent
enough to draw a call from a reader of The Straits Times to teachers ‘‘not [to] discourage O-level
students from attempting the argumentative writing topic in their English paper’’ (Ng, 2006).
Without sufficient experience in formal expository writing, the students who participated in the
online forum may not have been able to do more than re-enact their informal argument
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
243
behaviours if asked to write an expository essay expressly for the purpose of this study. Moreover,
the conventional limit of the school essay of 300–500 words (the O-level examination
requirement) could preclude the full range of possible stance maintenance moves, whereas the
3000-word post-graduate essay potentially offered scope for manifestation of more types of, and
more elaborated, stance support strategies.
The second reason for choosing a university student’s essay was that the third research
question (whether topic knowledge is put to rhetorical use) required an essay situated in a subject
of study so that domain-related topic knowledge in the essay could be easily identified. Topicspecific knowledge of any depth is generally not required nor expected in O-level type writing
tasks, as these typically feature everyday topics within the experience of fifteen- to sixteen-yearold students writing under examination conditions without access to external sources of
knowledge. Since the objective was not to compare students’ ability in argument construction but
to observe the nature of argument moves in two different environments, the difference in the
education level of the forum participants and the essay writer was considered less material than
the need to observe argument practices in situ, in their natural setting rather than in an artificial
task concocted for this research. More detailed information on the two texts and their writers
follows.
The forum postings, totalling about 2000 words, were written by three upper-secondary school
(high school) male students who were among the active participants in a school-administered
online forum. The topic of discussion was one that had been raised in the local media: which
fighter plane the government should purchase. Although hosted by the school, the online forum
was an informal platform where students could raise any topic for discussion and express their
views without being overly concerned with grammatical accuracy or quality of content, as would
be the case in the formal context of classroom essay writing. The English language proficiency
level of the authors of the postings may be described as above average to high. English being the
medium of education in all mainstream schools in Singapore, these students had been reading,
writing, and interacting in English in the classroom since their first year in primary school. They
were comfortable using English in social interaction with their peers, as the local speech register
of their forum messages attests. They were quite capable of switching to a more standard variety
of English in classroom writing tasks, producing coherent texts that were easily comprehensible,
though not always free of grammatical error.
The academic essay was written by a master’s student, referred to as Student L in this paper,
for an academic writing course for post-graduate students. Her school educational background
was similar to that of the forum participant students—English medium schooling from primary
through secondary in government (public) schools. She was capable of moving effortlessly
between the informal local variety of English and Standard English.
Student L’s essay was an assignment that required students to write a 3000-word essay
justifying their choice of the research problem they would be investigating for their master’s
thesis. The writing task allowed the student to choose her topic in much the same way that the
forum participants could choose the topic of discussion to respond to. In keeping with the
assignment instructions, Student L’s essay was accompanied by a commentary describing her
intended moves and explaining the motivation for her choice of meanings and organisation
decisions. The rationale for requiring the commentary was to provide a channel for students to
demonstrate explicitly the genre practices and cognitive processes learnt from the academic
writing course. Student L’s essay and commentary made quite plain that her goal was to argue the
validity of a proposal to research the effectiveness of teaching pre-university students to perform
evaluative acts during writing as a means of improving their examination performance in the
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A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
comprehension paper in the subject known as General Paper. As a teacher of General Paper,
Student L spoke and wrote English with native-like proficiency. (The General Paper is a core
subject in the Singapore-Cambridge A-level examinations administered by the University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and the Ministry of Education of Singapore. Paper 2
of the General Paper is a comprehension paper testing the skills of analysis, interpretation, and
evaluation.)
The identification of stance assertion and stance support moves in the texts studied was guided
by the definition of a move as a verbal act or series of verbal acts expressing meanings aimed at
accomplishing a high-level social-rhetorical goal the writer has for the text. This definition is
derived from Swales’ (1990) use of the term ‘‘move’’ in his ‘‘Create a Research Space’’ model for
article introductions (p. 141) to account for the ‘‘rhetorical movement’’ (p. 140) as the writer
builds the text to argue the significance of the research reported in the article. The description of
the move performed by a clause or group of clauses in a text is determined by its function with
reference to the writer’s whole-text goal, which is indicated through a combination of implied or
explicit statements of authorial intention and the social context of the writing task. For example,
allusions in the closing sentence of a paragraph to the writer’s overall position on an issue would
indicate a Maintain Focus on Position move. A list of moves expected in written arguments was
drawn up to guide text analysis (Fig. 1). The selection of items for the list was informed by the
findings of a study of students’ argument moves in an online forum (Chandrasegaran & Kong,
Fig. 1. Stance-taking and stance-support moves.
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
245
2006) and by my observations, as a teacher of academic writing, of university students’ written
arguments.
To determine if topic knowledge was put to rhetorical use in the students’ texts, topic
knowledge was defined as information about the issue of discussion or argument or knowledge
about topics which the writer had introduced into the discussion. Topic knowledge was
categorised as put to rhetorical use if it played a contributory role in explaining, maintaining focal
attention on, or supporting the writer’s position on the issue of discussion or argument. An
example of topic knowledge serving a rhetorical function is the citation of a source as evidence of
the validity of the writer’s claim. Topic knowledge identified in the texts as not serving a
rhetorical function was information that was recounted without an explicitly indicated purpose
with reference to the writer’s overall intention in the argument, or an implied purpose and
relevance which a reader can retrieve from the context.
Findings
Stance assertion and stance support moves were found in both forum postings and the
academic essay, thus providing an affirmative answer to the first question asked in this study.
From Table 1, where a tick against a move represents its occurrence at least once in the text, it can
be seen that support moves found in both forum postings and the essay include citing authority,
rhetorical use of book knowledge, and appealing to shared values in the writer’s and reader’s
discourse community such as patriotism (in the case of the forum postings) or topic significance
(in the academic essay). Counter-argument moves were found in the forum postings but not in the
academic essay although there was scope for such moves. Since Student L’s essay was arguing for
the need for research into the explicit teaching of interpretive discourse acts as a means of
improving students’ answers in the General Paper, there was scope for addressing opposing views
that doubt the viability of such instruction or believe in alternative explanations (e.g., poor
grammar) for students’ unsatisfactory answers.
Table 1
Stance assertion and support moves in two contexts
Argument moves
1.
1.1
1.2
2.
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7.1
2.7.2
2.7.3
2.7.4
2.7.5
Stance assertion
Announce/indicate position
Maintain focus on position (through allusion/reiteration)
Stance support
State/introduce stance support claim
Cite authority
Use (comment on/manipulate) book
knowledge for rhetorical purpose
Project hypothetical outcome
Appeal to values (patriotism, significance, etc.)
Forecast organisation of argument
Question (anticipated) opposing view (OV)
State counter-claim (to counter OV)
Question grounds or assumption underlying OV
Concede OV (partially)
Downgrade significance of OV
School forum
postings
University academic
essay
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
U
Not applicable
U
U
U
U
U
Not
U
U
Not
Not
Not
Not
Not
evident
evident
evident
evident
evident
evident
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A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
Although stance-support moves were found in the two genres, there was a difference in how
they were signalled. In the forum postings, intentions to support a position and the support
function of clauses were explicitly indicated. In the academic essay, stance support intentions and
support functions in stretches of text were often implied or obliquely expressed rather than
explicitly signalled. For example, the intention to support a claim for the validity of the writer’s
proposed research into the teaching of interpretive acts was only alluded to (‘‘Her study [cited in
the preceding sentences] adds value to my research area’’ [see Sentence 42, Fig. 2]) but not
elaborated. As Fig. 2 shows, the sentence containing this allusion to Student L’s own study
(Sentence 42) ends her argument in the section, the next paragraph being the start of a new section
on a different topic. The reader is thus left to work out how the cited work bolsters Student L’s
claim that teaching interpretive acts could positively affect performance in the comprehension
segment of the General Paper.
In the forum postings, stance support moves were signalled in a sustained fashion through
explicit indicators of intention to defend the writer’s position, as in these examples (in italics)
from the posting reproduced in Fig. 3:
Raising opposing view to be rebutted – Coming to the issue of . . .
Indicating shift to rebuttal moves – But . . .
Adding reasons to disprove opposing view – It’s not like . . . anyway . . . Also . . .
In addition, the presence of cohesive ties between elaborative clauses, such as the recurrent
expression of meanings relating to ‘‘cost’’ (underlined in Fig. 3), creates a consistent focus on the
writer’s intention to rebut an opposing claim (too expensive) and thereby assert his own. At the
same time, the cohesion device of employing words belonging to one area of semantic meaning
(cost) enables the reader to see the relation between the rebuttal claims and the writer’s position.
Explicit indication of intent to defend the writer’s own stance (in favour of more expensive
aircraft) is further marked by a Stance Reiteration move at the end of the message (which . . . are a
lot more capable . . . can perform many different roles . . .).
Fig. 2. Excerpt from academic essay.
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
247
Fig. 3. Elaborated stance support in forum posting.
In answer to the second question asked in this study (what support strategies are evident?), we
may infer from Table 1 the following strategies:
Citing authority;
Using book knowledge as evidence or warrant for a claim;
Appealing to the discourse community’s values;
Projecting a hypothetical outcome to argue the benefit of one’s own position or the negative
side of the opposing view; and
Anticipating and countering an opposing view by questioning it or downplaying its
significance.
All these strategies were observed in the forum postings. All but the last two were found in the
academic essay. Although opposing positions were not raised in Student L’s essay there was, as
noted earlier, scope for anticipating and counter-arguing such positions.
Topic knowledge from published sources featured in both forum postings and the academic
essay, though the stance support motivation for the knowledge included was expressed with
different degrees of explicitness in the two types of texts. In the forum postings, the rhetorical
function of knowledge about fighter planes was easily discernable in nearly all instances. An
example can be seen in Fig. 3 where Student J’s knowledge of the maintenance cost of different
fighter planes (in Sentences 5–7) is employed to rebut the opposing view that the plane he favours
is too expensive. Interviews with some of the ‘‘fighter plane’’ forum participants, including
Student J, confirmed that they were avid readers of defence magazines such as Jane’s and Air
International. As illustrated in Fig. 3, this stance support intention is readily apparent to the
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Fig. 4. Use of book knowledge in academic essay.
reader through framing signals of the writer’s goal to challenge an opposing view with a list of
counter-arguments (But . . . Moreover . . . Also . . .), and through the cohesion chains of meaning
centred around the topic of cost raised by the opposing view (cost, $ 1 billion, pay).
A typical example of how topic knowledge is used in the academic essay can be seen in Fig. 4,
extracted from a section entitled ‘‘The role of schema in reading comprehension.’’ To save space,
only parts of key sentences from 5 of the 7 paragraphs in the section are reproduced below.
According to Student L’s commentary on her essay, her goal was to validate her proposed
investigation of the viability of teaching evaluative acts as a means of improving written answers
in the GP reading comprehension paper. In her commentary on the ‘‘schema’’ section in Fig. 4,
the intention to ‘‘validate’’ or ‘‘justify my area of research’’ was explicitly stated once and
indirectly referred to three times. The intent to legitimize her proposed research was executed
through the concluding sentence of Paragraph 5 (Fig. 4). The sentence, in full, appears in bold in
Fig. 5 where more of Paragraph 5 is reproduced.
Through the mention of ‘‘evaluative acts’’ and ‘‘interpreting the text’’ Student L appears to be
signalling her intention to legitimize an assumption underlying her proposed research—the
assumption that evaluative/interpretive acts are an integral part of the comprehension process.
Her commentary made quite plain that she intended the legitimization of this assumption as
justification for her proposal to investigate the effect of teaching evaluative acts as a means to
better performance by General Paper students in the comprehension examination paper. Coming
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249
Fig. 5. Use of book knowledge to justify writer’s position.
towards the end of the ‘‘Schema Theory’’ section, the concluding sentence of Paragraph 5 was
meant to indicate the supporting role of Student L’s knowledge on schema in arguing her macro
claim about the value of teaching evaluative acts.
It must be reiterated that the purpose of the above description of argument moves in the forum
postings and academic essay is not to make comparative judgements about the writers or to imply
a denigration of Student L’s writing ability. The purpose is to obtain a picture of the argument
behaviours that students are capable of in peer-to-peer interaction and in a formal writing context.
The findings show that the intention to support a stance was present in both the forum postings
and the academic essay. The analysis of moves revealed that the forum participants’ discourse
repertoires contain stance support moves that could be harnessed and developed for use in
academic writing.
Discussion
This study of argument moves in online forum postings and in an academic essay was
undertaken to throw light on the question of whether there are socially situated argument skills
that may be relevant for the development of competence in academic writing. The findings reveal
that stance assertion and stance support moves occur in both online postings and the academic
essay, offering grounds for affirming suggestions made previously (Kramer-Dahl, 2005; Street,
1997) to value students’ out-of-school literacy practices in literacy classrooms. The range of
argument moves found in the forum postings indicates that instruction in expository essay writing
in secondary school could profitably start from the argument practices that students enact in peerto-peer interaction with the teacher building on those practices by demonstrating the
modifications that must be made to adapt the stance support moves of informal argument for
argument in academic essay writing. Furthermore, the occurrence of counter-argument moves
and the rhetorical use of topic knowledge in the forum excerpts from students who had not
undergone systematic training in expository writing challenges the deficit view of some
Singapore teachers that secondary school students ‘‘can’t argue.’’ The reality may be closer to the
view that most students have some ability in argument construction even if they have not been
formally taught.
The type and ordering of moves in the online forum postings (in Table 1) suggest that
secondary students’ argumentation skills include the countering of opposing views and overt
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rhetorical deployment of topic knowledge for stance support, skills needed in academic writing
to generate considered, balanced arguments and demonstrate a student’s mastery of content
knowledge. These skills do not appear to transfer naturally to academic writing tasks, considering
Student L’s rather understated and indirect signalling of her intention to use topic knowledge
from the literature to support her macro claim. The appearance of counter-argument moves in the
forum postings and not in the essay seems to confirm Moss’ (2000) observation that ‘‘informal
literacies do not act as a powerful resource within schooled settings (p. 62)’’. An alternative
explanation may lie in the model of ‘‘achievement of precompetence’’ proposed by Austin,
Dwyer’ and Freebody (2003, p. 69). The absence of counter-arguments and the indirect signaling
of stance support may reflect Student L’s achievement of precompetence in expository writing,
suggesting perhaps that explicit instruction is needed to enable students to capitalize on their
‘‘informal literacies’’ and move the student to the next level of writing competence.
The fairly sophisticated argument moves in the forum postings suggest that more overtly
signaled stance support moves can be activated during academic writing in a form aligned with
the conventions of academic discourse if instruction is provided in academic writing courses. The
possibility of developing informal argument skills for formal academic writing poses the
question of how this can be achieved. Based on the argument moves observed in the texts
analysed in this study and the manner of their realisation, two approaches to instruction seem
necessary. The first is to guide students to the conceptualisation of a felt intention to persuade
their reader to accept their position on the issue posed by the writing task so that they can use their
rhetorical intention to manage the thinking and writer–reader interaction processes during
writing. The second is to encourage a rhetorical-function approach to book knowledge so that
student writers view knowledge critically for its potential use as ground or warrant for their own
claims and not as ‘‘facts’’ to be recounted without comment.
If students write with a sustained felt intention to argue their thesis, the intention would very
likely influence choice of meaning and language at paragraph and sentence level to produce
recurrent allusions to a consistent overall stance, thus observing the practice in English academic
writing of pointing out ‘‘the main thesis . . . repeatedly, so as not to be missed’’ (Mauranen, 1993,
as cited in Hyland, 2006, p. 150). The first step to writing with a felt rhetorical intention may be
through group or individual exercises that channel students’ focal attention from content
knowledge to the explicit and tacit demands of the writing task. Students might work in small
groups to identify the required discourse acts implied in the wording of the essay question (e.g., to
assert what kind of interpretive position about what issue) and the cultural (disciplinary) values
operating in the knowledge community that determine the kinds of claims that can be made and
the nature of evidence that is regarded as acceptable. When students pay deliberate attention to
how they intend to respond to the demands of the writing assignment in terms of the stance they
would take and the rhetorical moves they should make, their socially acquired argument skills are
more likely to come into play with the possibility of enhancing their sensitivity to underelaborated or un-elaborated support claims and directing their thinking to the transforming of
book knowledge to serve their rhetorical purpose.
A strongly felt commitment to a position appears to be responsible for the skilful weaving of
different types of support moves into convincing arguments in many of the forum postings, Fig. 3
being an example. The forum participants’ commitment to the position they expressed in their
postings must have sprung from their avid interest in fighter planes, an interest confirmed in
interviews. It may be inferred that there has to be some degree of active engagement with an issue
before students can adopt the attitudinal posturing that enables them to step into the authorial role
of ‘‘arguer and . . . evaluator’’ (Flottum, Dahl, & Kinn, 2006, p. 82) in expository writing.
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Instruction in expository writing, especially at high school and college level, should perhaps
include explicit teaching of the cognitive and writer–reader interaction processes for sustaining
visibility of the macro claim in the writer’s position throughout a text so that students can, to
borrow a phrase from Lillis (2006), ‘‘populate their text with their own intention’’ (p. 40).
One method of explicit teaching, known in genre-based pedagogy as deconstruction (e.g.,
Veel, 2006), is teacher-guided observation of stance taking and stance support moves in well
written expository essays. But deconstruction of expert writers’ argument moves may be
insufficient if students view argument acts as esoteric classroom knowledge far removed from
their discourse experience. To bridge the gap between socially acquired informal argument
practices and school-based expository writing, deconstruction of well formed written arguments
might be accompanied by demonstration of stance support moves taken from transcripts of
students’ informal arguments in online discussion or class debates. A graphic account of the
moves and move organisation they are capable of (like those in Fig. 3) could raise students’
confidence in their argument-construction skills and encourage them to transfer to academic
writing the same felt intention to persuade an audience that impels their argument moves in peerto-peer interaction.
It must be acknowledged that stance assertion and support moves in academic writing are
realised differently from the same moves in friendly, everyday argument. The objective of
showing students their informal acts of argumentation is not to suggest that these acts can be
transplanted without modification to formal writing but to build students’ self confidence in their
existing argument practices and their ability to adopt the attitudinal posturing of ‘‘arguer.’’
Having convinced students that they are capable of the stance assertion and stance support moves
of argument, the writing teacher can proceed in subsequent lessons to show them how these
moves are typically enacted and organised in expository writing in disciplinary contexts relevant
to the class. One of the earliest lessons in the writing course may have to help students to
distinguish between stances that are personal points of view (such as those expressed in a forum
discussion) and positions that are legitimized by the values and practices of the disciplinary
community. Explicit instruction could demonstrate how the culture of a discipline may require
students to qualify and hedge thesis and support claims so as to project the persona of cautious,
objective scholar. Students of non-native English speaking backgrounds would also need lessons
to practise the linguistic structures for realising qualification and hedging. In addition, most
students (like Student L, the writer of the essay featured in this paper) are likely to benefit from
explicit instruction in the judicious selection and rhetorical use of knowledge from published
sources to serve as ground and warrant for claims. Lessons on the rhetorical use of knowledge
may be more effective if they include the linguistic forms for overtly signalling the argument role
of cited knowledge, its relevance to the student writer’s thesis, and the student’s evaluative or
interpretive comment, because form and discourse function are inextricably linked.
Notwithstanding Moss’ (2000) observation that ‘‘informal literacies do not act as a powerful
resource within schooled settings’’ (p. 62), bringing students’ informal argument practices into
the writing class could contribute to the development of those practices into competencies for
expository writing for academic purposes if instruction explicitly targets the transformation and
adaptation of informal discourse behaviours for academic contexts.
The naturalness with which the forum participants used their knowledge of fighter planes to
argue their position suggests the viability of encouraging a rhetorical-function approach to topic
knowledge, the second pedagogical approach advocated in this section. The fact that the writing
of academic expository essays is often situated in the context of student assessment in content
courses seems to channel students’ focal attention to book knowledge in the subject and the
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accurate re-statement of that knowledge at the cost of attention to the interpersonal dimension of
achieving argument goals. Given the fact that ‘‘often the knowledge available is not in the form
required for the communicative demands’’ (Kucer, 2005), an overwhelming preoccupation with
topic knowledge probably accounts for the low level incidence of knowledge synthesizing that
Folman and Connor (2005) have observed in students’ essays—an observation that could be
justifiably made of sections in Student L’s essay. Knowledge synthesis is the result of selecting
and re-organising items of knowledge for a communicative goal, creating links between
knowledge items not explicitly linked in the original source, and deciding what aspects to
foreground and background—all cognitive procedures subsumed in the process referred to by
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) as knowledge transforming. As attitude to knowledge has been
recognised as a constraint on the quality of the argument (Santos & Santos, 1999), instruction in
knowledge transforming processes could nudge students towards an attitudinal approach to book
knowledge that sees knowledge as propositions to be manipulated for rhetorical purposes in their
own writing, rather than as ‘‘facts’’ for accurate reproduction.
Explicit instruction in knowledge transforming might take the form of practice exercises in reorganising knowledge to fit given rhetorical goals and activities that develop the mental posturing
appropriate for the writer’s role of arguer in the context of the disciplinary course for which the
writing task is set. Practice exercises could involve small groups of students working
collaboratively on evaluating the relevance of information in excerpts from the course reading
and then re-organising selected relevant information to serve a given rhetorical goal (e.g., to
provide grounds for a given thesis claim or to serve as warrant to back a support claim).
Conscious attempts at deploying knowledge for a rhetorical purpose could result in students
engaging more with the ideas they encounter in sources and could engender a depth of knowledge
that is likely to enhance the quality of their arguments to the extent that merely ‘‘ventriloquating’’
(Lillis, 2006, p. 41) book knowledge would not.
Conclusion
This study of students’ argument practices in two different contexts has shown that student
writers engage in stance taking and stance support moves in both online forum postings and
the academic essay. The manner in which stance support is enacted in the forum postings
indicates that capabilities in countering anticipated opposing views and the deployment of
topic knowledge to serve argument goals exist in the informal discourse repertoire of
secondary school students. The presence of these capabilities suggests their potential for
development, through explicit instruction, into competencies for expository writing for
academic purposes.
These conclusions about students’ argumentation abilities and the pedagogical implications
derived from them must be offered with a degree of tentativeness, since the study observed only
two cases—one post-graduate student’s essay and the forum postings of three secondary students
on one thread of discussion. Still, each observation case can be regarded as ‘‘a concrete
realisation of a possibility that exists at the collective level (population)’’ (Ercikan & Roth, 2006,
p. 15). The possibility that exists, indicated by the observations reported in the findings section, is
that students have socially acquired skills of stance support that can, with the right instruction, be
developed for academic essay writing. Further research is needed to confirm if, impelled by a felt
social intention to justify a personal position, students would produce a complex organisation of
argument moves similar to those seen in the forum postings in this study. In addition, research in
pedagogical methods might test the efficacy of techniques of explicit instruction aimed at raising
A. Chandrasegaran / Journal of Second Language Writing 17 (2008) 237–254
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students’ metacognitive awareness of their socially acquired skills of stance support and at
harnessing those skills for expository writing in academic contexts.
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Antonia Chandrasegaran is an associate professor in the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She heads the Institute’s Teachers’
Language Development Centre and teaches courses in academic writing and composition research at undergraduate and
postgraduate level. Her research interests are in the areas of academic writing and the teaching of written discourse.