The development of audience perspective in argumentative writing of mid-school students – linguistic aspects
Submitted by:
Hilla Atkin
Abstract:
The writing process is a cognitive-interactive process, which is directed towards both the reader and the reading process, and presumes the active role of the readers and the dialogic aspect of writing (Amir & Atkin, 2016). Hence, it is rather important that writers will develop their reader's perspective. The dialogic approach does not view the writers as acting in solitary in a private and closed discourse environment, but rather interacting socially and communicatively with their audiences, being oriented toward them (Livnat, 2012, p. 18). The writers correspond with themselves and with their internal world due to the image of the addressees, which they form in their mind (Thompson, 2001). Even more so when writing a persuasive text, as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca put it: "Whereas speech is conceived in terms of audience […], the text is always conditioned, whether consciously or unconsciously, by those persons he wishes to address" (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958, p. 7).
One of the ways of developing a reader's perspective is observational learning (Rijlaarsdam et al., 2008, 2009; Fidalgo et al., 2015). Observing other students who read aloud texts written by other students, enables the observing students to understand the dialogic aspect of writing, including reader's perspective.
In this contribution, we shall present qualitative findings, which are part of a larger intervention study based on Rijlaarsdam et al. (2008, 2009) concerning the promotion of writing by observational learning. In addition to the systematic, quantitative analysis, we utilized fine-grained discourse analysis of selected writing products in resolution, which could not be achieved by the quantitative method. We shall focus on writing products of 7th grade students pre and post intervention, and follow the development of audience perspective by the analysis of marked and unmarked linguistic devices, which characterize this perspective.
Bibliography
Amir, A. and H. Atkin (2016). Dialogicity in secondary school students' argumentative writing A comparative study. Helkat Lashon, 49. (In Hebrew)
Fidalgo, R., Torrance, M., Rijlaarsdam, G., van den Bergh, H., & Álvarez, M. L. (2015). Strategy-focused writing instruction: Just observing and reflecting on a model benefits 6th grade students. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 41, 37-50.
Livnat, Z. (2012). Dialogue, Science and Academic Writing, John Benjamins.
Rijlaarsdam, G. C. W., Braaksma, M. A. H., Couzijn, M. J., Janssen, T. M., Raedts, M., van Steendam, E., & van den Bergh, H. (2008). Observation of peers in learning to write: Practice and research. Journal of writing research, 1, 53-83.
Rijlaarsdam, G., Braaksma, M., Couzijn, M., Janssen, T., Kieft, M., Raedts, M., ... & Van den Bergh, H. (2009). The role of readers in writing development: Writing students bringing their texts to the test. In: (Eds.) The Sage handbook of writing development, 436-452.