Abstract

LEITAO, Selma. The management of counter-arguments in children's argumentative writing. Temas psicol. [online]. 2000, vol.8, n.1, pp. 79-92. ISSN 1413-389X.

Most specialists agree that engaging in argumentative writing demands two actions: taking/supporting a claim as well as anticipating/reacting to alternative viewpoints. They also acknowledge that managing counter-arguments is among the hardest tasks children are faced with in argumentative writing. This paper has examined some of the reasons for that. Children have been asked to compose a text and also to estimate how essential certain utterances, either supportive or counter-argumentative, were to other texts. Results have indicated that when composing argumentative texts children treat as counter-arguments mainly those ideas that might give support to the position opposite to theirs. Most important, however, is their tendency to assign a secondary role to counter-arguments in a text. These results have been discussed in terms of the way such a tendency may contribute to the problems children have to face in the argumentative writing

Keywords : counter-argumentation; argumentative writing; text production.

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