Using online discussion stance support strategies for writing compositions

Chandrasegaran, A. (2006). Secondary school students’ stance-support strategies in online discussion: Implications for the composition classroom. English in Education, 40(2), 22-39.

Background

Changes to the English paper in the school leaving examination, de-emphasizing narrative writing in favour of expository genres, generated the need for students in Singapore schools to develop expository writing skills. However, students whose preferred language was not English were expected to have difficulty maintaining a point of view in English expository writing due to their imperfect mastery of the lexico-grammar.

Aims

This article showed how students’ argument practices and their use of linguistic resources in an informal context could be used in teaching writing skills.

Sample

The sample consisted of 192 forum postings from the students of one secondary school in Singapore, aged 15 to 16 years, whose dominant language was not English.

Method

Forum postings were first read to identify the student’s stance on the topic of discussion, or on another student’s response to the topic. The posting was next read to determine if there were statements supporting the claim. When support was identified, the strategy of support was coded.

Findings

The three most common support strategies used were: (a) using personal perception as grounds for the claim, (b) offering facts as evidence, and (c) recounting personal experience to back a claim. Students used the following support strategies less frequently: (a) hypothesizing outcomes to prove the positive or negative consequences of a position, (b) appealing to reader’s sympathy or other emotion, and (c) anticipating and countering an opposing view. They used analogy and citation of sources the least frequently. The author considered the most commonly used language structures used by students for the support strategies to be appropriate for expository essay writing at secondary school level.

Implications

The author proposed that given students’ ability to produce the observed language patterns in the forum postings, they would benefit most from the teaching of stance-support strategies, linking them to those that students used in the postings, rather than through remedial grammar teaching. Grammar lessons relating grammatical forms to discourse argument would be more effective in improving students’ writing than lessons focusing on correcting form errors in isolation.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.