Argumentation Skills for the Design of Formative Assessment Queries

Introduction

Through this review study, we aim at interpreting Walton’s theory and link it to the education field as argumentation skills for the design of formative assessment queries by Spanish bilingual pre-service teachers. In this regard, there is stated research to observe the influence of metacognition, meta-strategy, and epistemology on the argumentative competence where, from a practical perspective, the results pointed out towards a need for more empirical research on teaching and learning interactions to promote argumentation skills in both trainers and trainees (Rapanta et al., 2013). Since in –science– bilingual classrooms argumentation contributes to fostering literacy and cognition in learners (Aragón, 2007; Archila, 2013), especially for pre-service teachers aspiring to teach at bilingual schools, developing argument skills during their training period might represent a useful feedback tool in their future careers. The reason is that teachers need to conduct classroom discussions in a continuous fashion for further purposes (Kuhn, 2008). Apart from specific teacher training, bilingual education is experimenting relevant changes, and the transposition of monolingual (L1) didactic methodologies and teaching strategies to foreign language (L2) environments have fallen into disuse –leading to more specific and adapted Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approaches (Pérez, 2014). Also, because schoolchildren respond differently to external variability and stimuli (Dörnyei, 2005), in-service teachers’ daily acts of enquiry-based verbal feedback towards primary education students might have different effects on them if similar propositional contents reveal dissimilar illocutionary forces. For example, “‘You will leave the room’, can be used in different utterances, such as ‘Leave the room!’, or ‘You will leave the room’, or ‘Will you leave the room?’, having different illocutionary forces’” (Macagno & Walton, 2014, p. 129). Since argumentation is influenced by each speaker’s rhetorical competence and how it fits the audience it is aimed at (Walton, 2008a), awareness of assertive, directive, commissive, permissive, prohibitive, and declarative speech acts are relevant in the education field. Hence, to ascertain the accuracy level of speech acts and argumentation, self speech and arguments should be dialectically measured in terms of pragmatic and contextual functionality (Walton, 2005a). Yet argument analysis and assessment are considered here the first steps for a more accurate design of formative assessment queries later to be enquired to bilingual primary students.