How Can I Persuade You? The Development of Audience Awareness in Children's Oral and Written Arguments

argumentation;audience awareness;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Samudra, PreetiWellman, Henry M ;

University of Michigan

关键词: argumentation;    audience awareness;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/138639/preetigs_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Argumentation is a multi-faceted skill that is critical for both academic and social success. However, complex aspects of argumentation such as audience awareness and counterargumentation over the upper elementary school years have rarely been studied. This dissertation expands our understanding of child argumentation by investigating the role of audience similarity and mode of communication on argumentative competence.Part I focuses on how effectively third- and fifth- graders write arguments aimed at different audiences, one similar and one dissimilar to them based on age. Results showed that fifth graders demonstrated higher audience awareness than third graders overall, and that both third- and fifth- graders produced more persuasive arguments when writing to the similar audience, a fellow child, than to a dissimilar audience, an adult. The challenge of audience awareness incorporates both attending to the audience in general, and elevating arguments made to a dissimilar audience closer to the level reached when writing to a similar audience. Fifth graders surpassed third graders on the former skill, but not the latter.Part II focuses on children’s written and oral argumentation. Children were better organized in their writing, but produced more words and elaborations in their speaking. They exhibited few mode of communication differences in complex features of argumentation such as audience awareness. Additionally, providing a spoken argument prior to a written one did not benefit the quality of the written argument, but being able to talk about an argument after initially writing it made it more likely that children would make substantive revisions such as adding new ideas to their argument.The present dissertation also investigated children’s knowledge of argumentation, and uncovered that by the third grade, children have a strong intuitive sense of audience awareness. Their explicit understanding of the role of the audience in content selection is less developed, however. This explicit audience awareness predicted the persuasiveness of children’s own written arguments. Overall, this dissertation provides an in-depth investigation into the argumentative abilities of upper elementary-aged children and uncovers both struggles and competencies that hold important implications for instruction.