Argumentative structure in Brazilian students’ texts

ABSTRACT

This paper aims at showing that argumentative structures are present in texts written by students of a public primary school in Brazil. Our research was guided by three questions: 1) What argumentative chains are present in texts? 2) What conjunctions do students employ to create argumentative chains? 3) To what extent does the ability to use argumentative chains change along primary school? The corpus analysed comprises 123 texts written by a group of nine students attending from second to fifth school year. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. The analysis showed that participants were able to use argumentative chains in their texts since the beginning of the research, with predominance of normative chains. Moreover, it was possible to verify an increase in the number of semantic blocks in participants’ texts. These findings point to changes in both school curricula and language teaching classes.

Keywords:
Writing; Argumentation; Curriculum; Development