A critical exploration of argumentation in the texts that third-year Development Studies students interpret and construct

Ph.D. ( Education)The purpose of the educational linguistic research represented in this thesis is to explore the construction of written argumentation in Development Studies and to establish the implications of the findings for higher education teaching and learning that provides students with epistemological access to powerful discourse (Morrow 2007; 2009). The research is designed around analysis of the texts within the textual network that represents Development Studies in one case study: the final semester of a three-year undergraduate course in Development Studies. The textual network consists of texts from the fields of knowledge production, recontextualisation and reproduction (Bernstein 2000). Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2001; 2010) is used to explore how disciplinary and educational texts position students in ways that are enabling or constraining of the construction of argument. The perspective on written academic argument is informed by discourse theory, specifically, systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978); discourse semantics (Martin 1992), genre theory, and different approaches to the study of textual interaction (White 2003; Hyland 2005; 2008; Martin and White 2005). The thesis identifies and extends an emerging dialogical perspective on argumentation that draws on Bakhtinian theory (1981; 1986) and rhetoric-based strands of argumentation theory from North America, Britain and continental Europe. A framework was developed and implemented for the analysis of argument in knowledge-focused texts as ‘positioning’ in three ‘levels’ of discourse. In the research site, it was found that legitimate argumentation requires the production of a finely-balanced disciplinary discourse. This discourse involves negotiation of conflicting positionings of the writer in relation to the reader, and textual interaction with authoritative disciplinary voices and with competing discourses of inquiry and persuasion. Analysis of student texts in the dominant genre used for assessment, the multiple-source discussion essay, showed that few texts exhibit strong disciplinary argumentation. Argumentation in the majority of texts was cause for concern. Common problems that undermined students’ argumentation were: misunderstanding the prescribed texts, overreliance on sources, the use of inappropriate source texts and discourses, and underdeveloped discursive resources for the construction of argument. It is concluded that weak argumentation is partly attributable to the following factors: the heterogeneity of discourses and genres in the texts that instantiate the knowledge domain, inadequate theorization of argument as a dimension of disciplinary discourse, limited educational knowledge about written argumentation, conflicting discourses of argumentation and knowledge-making in the production and recontextualising fields, and confusion about the position students can take up in pedagogical discourse