Exploring and developing reasoning in primary English

The socio-cultural framework describes reasoning as a cultural phenomenon, expanding thinking to something which is played out in public. Drawing upon the academic field of cognitive history, this project argues that academic domains have developed their own ‘styles of reasoning’, which can be found as ways of arguing in debates and written texts, and which should be promoted in the school curriculum. This project identifies styles of reasoning drawn upon in English literature and of importance within primary English. Activities are developed which can be adapted to promote particular reasoning styles in the primary classroom. Transcripts are coded and analysed using the Cambridge Dialogue Analysis Scheme (CDAS) (Vrikki et al., 2018) which has been modified to capture style-specific reasoning in English. This paper gives an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the project as well as a brief description and justification of methodologies used