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Scaffolding Literary Analysis

March 30, 2017 by Room 213 Leave a Comment

Since I want them to identify author purpose and technique,  I look for short, interesting pieces of non-fiction where the writer has used a variety of ways to develop a thesis, ones where they have moved beyond just examples and statistics to the use of analogy or figurative language to push an idea. Always, we look at word choice and its effect.

I do the same with independent reading. Each day we do a short mini-lesson on how authors create meaning, perhaps how they use metaphor. I show them a mentor text; then, they will look for similar techniques in the books they are reading.  They will either write a short reflection or discuss what they’ve found with a partner. It’s all really low stakes — rarely for a mark — so students  can learn to do a literary analysis without the stress of a poor result.

Focus on skills, not content

Now, regardless of the genre I use, the focus is on the skills the students need to build, not on the text itself. If students can identify how a metaphor affects meaning in a news story or a song, they should be able to do so in a piece of classic literature too.

So, I focus on the skill, find accessible texts to teach them that skill, and then use a gradual release of responsibility to transition them into analyzing more difficult texts. You can read more about this process on a post I wrote called,  Teaching Students to Analyze Text.

Before I ask students to become more independent, I do a short lesson on note-taking and  using post-it notes effectively. I’ve written about this before ( check it out here ), and can’t stress enough how important this is. We can’t just expect kids to know how to take notes, how to discern what’s good to remember and what isn’t. Taking part of a class to teach them good note-taking skills is time very well spent, and helps you to scaffold literary analysis

Create an environment that encourages risk taking

One of the most important steps in teaching my kids to analyze lit, is setting an environment that allows them to do so. As I said earlier, this stuff is hard, and kids hate to be “wrong” in front of their peers. Therefore, we need to create a climate where they feel safe to make an educated guess, to put forward theories and to be “wrong.”

In order to do this I work hard to show them that there usually is not one “right answer.” In fact, complex texts should be open to multiple interpretations. In order to do this, you need to consider how you respond to student comments. It’s so natural to say “that’s right” or “great answer”,  but comments like “that’s an interesting observation. Can you (or anyone else) add to that?”  or, “that’s a great point. Does anyone see it differently?” will encourage students and promote the idea that multiple interpretations are desirable.

I start this process by modelling my own thinking when I see a difficult text for the first time. I’ll put a poem or a passage on the smart board, and highlight and underline, question and comment. I do all of this in front of the students. I’ll put forth a theory:  I think the author is suggesting… however, I’m not quite sure how this image/idea/point fits in. What do you guys think?  This last question is so important. I –the teacher– am asking their advice. I’m not certain and I need to collaborate to get closer to an answer. I will also encourage them to disagree with me — and to provide proof for why they do.

We also spend a lot of time fostering effective group discussions. I put one group in a circle in the middle of the room and give them a topic to discuss, something from the literature we are studying. We start the discussion and I model what good group work looks like. Then we switch it up and try it with another group. I encourage debate and say things like: I agree with Andrew’s point and I’d like to add…  Or, I might say I can see why you’d think that, but consider this…  Mostly, I encourage kids to use more textual evidence to back up their points.

Be willing to let them work it out

I do a lot of group work when kids are learning to analyze text . They are expected to come to class with notes they take while reading. Then, I put them together and let them hash it out. The question is always the same: what’s the purpose of this chapter/scene/section   and how doe the author achieve it?  The group meeting allows them to have exploratory discussion, so they can “think it out.” They discover what they know and what they need to figure out. They ask lots of questions. They pull ideas together while building on each one. They refute each other’s ideas in order to fine-tune  their thinking on the ideas in the text.

If however, they just can’t get it, or I notice that they have veered too far off the path, I ‘ll give them something to consider, a clue. I’ll tell them to think about it and come back to them later. If they still haven’t figured it out, I’ll give them another clue. If they still can’t get it, I will direct them more specifically.

After the group work, we always reconvene and have a full class discussion. At that point, I already know which group has come up with some insightful observations and so I can direct the discussion by asking them to contribute their ideas. However, I don’t usually start with that group. I’ll first ask a group that’s kinda there and then ask the other group what they can add. It’s a little manipulative, but the class feels like they’re working together rather than me just filling in the blanks for them.  And this goes back to the first question–they know I’m never going to stand at the front of the class and give them the answers. They know they have to work to find them. Because of this, I think it’s more likely that they might actually do some of the work.

After we’ve done enough of these activities, students will have to show me what they’ve learned in an assessment. I always start with something short — maybe a paragraph that analyzes a quote or a character — and give them some formative feedback. Then, when I think they’re ready, we will write a literary essay.

There’s nothing more satisfying than helping a kid find success in an area that they find difficult. They may never come to love the process of analyzing lit, but they sure will find pride in knowing that they can.  I’ve got a ton of exercises and activities that I use to get my kids to think about texts. You’ll find a lot of them here on my blog and also in this bundle of  Critical Thinking Activities for Any Text .

Would you like more strategies for teaching analysis? Read this post.

Reader Interactions

March 31, 2017 at 12:42 am

I enjoyed this post and plan to put a lot of it into action. I have a couple of questions, though. First, I noticed that you said that your students "are expected to come to class with notes they take while reading." Do your students reliably complete their assigned reading? At the school where I teach, no teachers assign reading in the standard level classes – the students won't do it, so all reading is done in class, which is time-consuming and often boring. In the honors classes, we do assign reading, but I would say that maybe 20% of the students actually do the reading, 60% look at sparknotes or watch the movie, and 20% don't bother to pretend that they've read at all. Could you write a post about how you get your students to complete their assigned reading?

Second, when you have your students analyzing in small groups rather than as a class, how do you prevent students from arriving at incorrect interpretations? I don't mean different interpretations – I agree that great literature is open to multiple interpretations – but sometimes they come up with an interpretation that completely misses the mark (especially with poetry). I'm sure you catch many errors while walking around, but probably not all. Do you just let them make mistakes?

Thanks for some great ideas!

March 31, 2017 at 9:51 am

Those are great questions, Erin. I will do a follow up post later today!

March 31, 2017 at 6:16 pm

Erin, If you re-read the post, I've added some ideas that deal with your question about incorrect interpretations. I'm also about to publish a new post that deals with your question about reading. Thanks for asking!

March 31, 2017 at 10:47 pm

Thank you! Love your blog!

April 1, 2017 at 1:03 pm

One of the techniques I use to scaffold analysis skills is a good film analysis. After all, they have been watching movies longer than they have been reading, right? By starting in their comfort zone, they can find success early and keep at it when it gets a bit more challenging. I use consistent language when analyzing film for maximum transfer to analyzing lit. What choices did the director make? What effect do they have on the audience? (Costuming is always a great place to start for character analysis.) Two units I have especially loved pairing film analysis with close reading are To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet (1997 version!). Not only do these quality films provide many opportunities for analysis, it also hurts my literary heart just a little less knowing that students at least are getting "the whole story" when we inevitably can't read the entire piece. We are usually alternating between film analysis and lit analysis- which can be tiring, but nearly so much as the human cliff notes song and dance of in class readings! I have been doing this successfully for a couple of years now and cannot believe the difference it has made in my students' understanding. Music videos also work great with poetry and commercials are perfect for rhetorical strategies of speeches!

Thank you so much for addressing this tough skill. I found this post this morning while browsing Pinterest and will be following for more great ideas!

April 2, 2017 at 10:46 am

Great ideas, Sarah. I always start my IB class with viewing Dead Poets Society. After we watch, I assign youtube clips to groups and have them analyze what the director was trying to achieve in the scene and the techniques used to achieve it. Like you, I see it as an accessible way to get them into analysis. Thanks for sharing!

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February 19, 2019 at 5:21 am

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Scaffolding Literary Analysis: Step-by-Step to Reach Success

February 25, 2017 Carla Assessment/feedback , Education , Reading/Writing Workshop , Teaching Techniques 6

Let’s face it — for most students, literary analysis is just plain hard.

And teaching it is even harder.

All too often, when teachers feel pressured to cover curriculum, they focus on teaching content rather than skills, when in actual fact, skills are what our students will take away from our classrooms. We tend to think that students will somehow develop these abilities (through osmosis?) as we teach our content. But the truth is, most students need explicit teaching of skills, which should be taught through our content.

In other words, content knowledge is not the goal — skills are the goal and content is the medium through which we teach those skills. Reading analysis can be difficult to teach, though, and in order to do it well, we need to break it down into small, manageable chunks which we teach and reteach as often as necessary.

Our Language Arts teachers recently noticed that students were having difficulty answering reading comprehension questions. In 7 th grade, for their reading assignments, students were expected to include an opinion, evidence to support their opinion, and an explanation of how that evidence supported their answer. By 12 th grade, they needed to include a thesis statement and several paragraphs of evidence, along with analysis of that evidence. At all grade levels students were struggling with these different components, and our teachers decided that they needed to work together to break down the lessons and scaffold the learning until students could work independently.

An example of teaching literary analysis in 8 th grade:

  In 8 th grade, teachers decided that their students should be able to do the following:

• restate the question in their answer
• paraphrase or quote evidence
• make an analysis by referring back to the question, contextualizing, and explaining how their evidence proves their quote

The 8 th grade lessons:

• Students were given a reading response assignment and, along with their teacher, they created a rubric to guide them.
• After they wrote their responses, their teacher, Laura, identified the elements that her students found difficult.

R.A.C.E anchor chart

She gave them a mini-lesson on the different parts of a response (R.A.C.E.). The R.A.C.E. criteria are posted on an anchor chart in the classroom. Anchor charts scaffold the learning by allowing students to refer to them whenever they need them.

• Then Laura asked her students to highlight their work with different colors to identify each part of the R.A.C.E. process.
• After color coding, students needed to self-assess their literary analyses by grading themselves on their previously-created rubric.

Entrance slip to practice restating questions

• In subsequent reading responses, in order to help students learn to independently self-assess and revise their work, students had to highlight their work using the R.A.C.E. criteria. If they noticed that they were missing elements, they were to add them before handing their work in.
• After the students had worked on several responses, Laura asked her students to look back over all of their feedback, identify three opportunities for improvement, and then rewrite their latest response, trying to progress in the areas they’d identified.

Thanks to Laura’s explicit teaching of skills, most of the 8th grade students are now managing to write cohesive, in-depth analyses of their reading.

Teamwork rocks!  It’s by working together that our Language Arts teachers are making such an incredible difference. They’re using this type of scaffolding at each grade level, helping students incorporate new skills. In the 9 th grade, students are taught to expand on their responses by including a strong hook in their introduction and by supporting their opinions with two pieces of evidence. Stepping stones are added until, by grade 12, students are comfortable writing a literary analysis paper, fluidly incorporating quotes into their work, and clearly analyzing how the evidence connects to their opinions.

Scaffolding helps students develop a growth mindset  — and when they finally master a skill that seemed impossibly difficult at first, they develop self-confidence and begin to take risks. They’re also developing independence: learning to self-assess and revise their work without needing as much feedback from teachers. Although teachers need to put in a lot of time and effort (and have a fair bit of patience!) during the scaffolded lessons, this kind of teaching pays off in the long run. Students are eventually able to work independently, and their assignments are much stronger.

Hi Carla- I enjoyed learning about what 8th grade literary analysis should look like. I often have students to restate their questions and paraphrase but, sometimes second guess what I am asking of my students and worry I am asking too much of them. This post helped me identify where they should be. Thanks for posting such a comprehensive piece.

Thanks for reading Anthony! Our teachers also struggled with the feeling that they’re expectations were too high. Clearly defining what they should expect at each level and then working with the students to make sure they understood the expectations, has made all the difference. Students are feeling successful and confident.

As a former AP literature teacher, I can say that this skill building is essential. Even when they got to me in 11th or 12th grade, I would still need to spend time teaching the nuts and bolts of analysis using various scaffolding methods, TPCASTT. SOAPSTone or DIDDLS, or a few others. The scaffold made it very clear what the student was looking for, and after some handholding and walking through a few of the types, they caught on rather quickly and left the scaffolding behind. You article contains some great tips that I can use with my middle school teachers to help get that skill development started earlier, and to the benefit of our students. Thanks so much!

I’m glad this was helpful to you Tom. We have an amazing group of teachers and they were all working hard to help their students, but they felt frustrated because they didn’t clearly know what was expected at each grade level. Hashing out what students should be able to do at each grade level and to clarify their role in this continuum of learning has helped all of them feel more effective and less frustrated. And our kids are rocking reading responses!

Hi Carla! You write so well. Love your blog posts. This one just shows what is possible when care and imagination come together. I think the strategy is a powerful one and the expectations per grade easily achieved–as you can see. I will share this with my English-teacher friends. #sunchatblogger

Thanks Gillian! Having teacher share their weaknesses and truly collaborate has given incredible results…they’re an inspiring team!

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11 Effective Scaffolding Strategies for Secondary ELA

Looking to bridge the learning gaps in your classroom? Help students work through complex topics and texts with effective scaffolding strategies. Learn how to use scaffolded instruction to establish a supportive learning environment where every student has the opportunity to succeed.

I think we can all agree that students come to us with varying learning preferences and abilities. Given the limited time and resource constraints, it can feel like an uphill battle to help every student succeed, especially those who struggle to grasp new concepts.

Enter scaffolded instruction.

Having a strong understanding of scaffolding strategies, including when and how to implement them, is a vital component of success for all students, no matter their age or abilities. These must-know teaching strategies help students go from feeling overwhelmed and wanting to give up to finding the confidence to complete complex tasks successfully.

After reading this post, you’ll better understand how to bring the benefit of scaffolding into your classroom.

What is Scaffolding in Secondary Education?

Much like scaffolding in construction is used to support the building of a structure, scaffolding in education supports skill building and, ultimately, academic achievement. It involves breaking down complex skills into manageable steps to provide guidance and support until students can tackle tasks independently.

This method is vital in navigating the secondary ELA landscape, where students face higher-level reading comprehension, critical thinking, literature analysis, and writing skills. It eases students into gradual progression where they can confidently approach more complex materials and apply higher-level skills.

Scaffolded Learning vs. Differentiated Learning

It’s true that scaffolded learning and differentiated learning are connected, but they are not the same thing. Scaffolded learning provides temporary structured support toward gradual independence around a concept or skill. Differentiated learning focuses on modifying instruction and learning materials to meet individual needs. That said, scaffolding strategies are often employed in support of differentiated instruction.

Whether employed together or individually, these two teaching strategies help you create a more inclusive and effective learning environment for all.

The Benefits of Scaffolded Instruction

There are several benefits of scaffolded instruction in secondary ELA or any classroom, including:

• Fostering a positive and supportive learning environment
• Giving students built-in “check-points” to ask for help
• Empowering teachers to provide additional support as needed
• Encouraging students to build skills gradually while increasing confidence
• Proactively minimizing student learning gaps
• Reducing student frustration, overwhelm, and confusion
• Engaging students in the learning process
• Breaking down complex concepts and tasks into manageable steps
• Laying a foundation for independence and autonomy
• Promoting information retention and a deeper understanding of the material
• Allowing teachers to adapt lessons to meet student’s needs
• Ensuring mastery of foundational skills before moving on to more advanced concepts

Now that you know the benefits, you might be wondering how to effectively incorporate scaffolded instruction into your classroom, bringing me to the part I know you’ve been waiting for.

Scaffolding Strategies for the ELA Classroom

When choosing a scaffolding strategy for your classroom, it’s important to consider the skills and concepts at hand and your student’s needs and abilities. To help you get started, here are some scaffolding strategies I’ve found particularly useful in secondary ELA.

1. Pre-Teach Vocabulary

You never want terminology to be the roadblock for student success. Therefore, it’s helpful to introduce and explain key vocabulary words before delving into new concepts or reading material. Additionally, take time to review the terms in context to deepen student understanding. By pre-teaching vocabulary , you equip students with the necessary language and knowledge needed to comprehend the material at hand.

This strategy enhances their understanding of context and enables a smoother engagement with the content. It is especially beneficial for texts with challenging or subject-specific language, ensuring students can navigate and comprehend the content more effectively.

2. Preview Reading Materials

To ease students into complex reading material, provide opportunities for them to dip their toes into the context before diving in. Previewing reading material involves providing an overview, discussing key themes, or introducing relevant background information. Therefore, students understand what to expect from a text, promoting better comprehension and stronger engagement.

For example, allow students to flip through the text to gauge the structure, language, and content, encouraging them to ask clarifying or curious questions before reading. This will help activate prior knowledge, establish context, and spark interest, making the text more accessible.

For more pre-reading activities, read this post here.

3. Start Short

Whether you’re introducing a new genre, theme, unit, or writing style, consider starting with a shorter assignment first. Maybe that involves reading a short story or poem to familiarize students with a particular genre, writing style, or theme before reading a full-length text. It could also look like having students write a full-length essay in phases and providing feedback after each step before putting it all together.

Not only does this allow you to provide quick and targeted feedback along the way, but it also minimizes student overwhelm and procrastination with larger or longer assignments. Students will have more confidence going into the more complex material.

4. Activate Prior Knowledge

Before diving into a new concept, tap into your students’ prior knowledge. Calling upon what they already know helps establish a sense of connection to and relevance of the material, helping to build confidence and intrinsic motivation. It also sets the stage for a deeper understanding of what they are about to learn.

Try kicking off your lesson with a brief discussion, relevant questions, a KWL chart , or a quick review of previously learned material.

5. Provide Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are powerful learning tools that provide visual and structured guidance for students as they learn. These visual note-taking tools help them process information, follow steps, and organize their thoughts before, during, or after learning. It can help students organize their thoughts and grasp the relationship between information, guiding them through anything from text analysis to essay planning.

For example, help students organize their thoughts with Venn diagrams, mind maps, plot diagrams, or flow charts. They can work through the resources in groups, as a class, or independently, allowing you to employ them for various purposes.

Check out my various FREE printable graphic organizers!

6. Support with Visual Aids

While graphic organizers help students process and organize information in a visually structured fashion, it’s not the only way we can support students with visual aids. Charts, video clips, images, and diagrams provide visual cues to help students process and comprehend new information and concepts.

They are also a great tool to ensure you are supporting various learning styles while helping students make connections between visual representations and the content you are teaching. This is a particularly effective scaffolding strategy for struggling students and English language learners.

7. Encourage a Think, Pair, Share Approach

While some scaffolding strategies require planning, this strategy can be implemented on the fly as needed (#convenient). The “Think, pair, share” approach encourages students to activate critical thinking. It involves students individually considering a question or prompt, discussing their thoughts with a partner, and then sharing their ideas with the whole class. Similarly, you can encourage students to engage in a quick “turn and talk” where they share their ideas with their neighbors.

Either way, it promotes collaboration and active participation while enhancing both comprehension and communication skills. This strategy gives them time to work through their thoughts in stages, learn from one another, and minimize the fear of sharing one’s thoughts with the class.

8. Show, Don’t Just Tell

We often tell our students to “show, not tell” in descriptive writing. We can take our own advice when it comes to scaffolding. Sometimes, students need more than verbal explanations, needing to see a concept or skill in action . Modeling is a powerful scaffolding strategy that involves demonstrating a skill or concept before expecting students to try it themselves. Pair modeling with thinking out loud as you walk students through the process to target both auditory and visual learners.

Whether analyzing a poem, annotating a passage, or writing a strong thesis statement, a well-executed model can help students understand the steps they can implement independently.

9. Ask Guiding Questions

Information overload is very much a thing. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for some students to struggle to identify essential information or organize their thoughts. This is especially true for middle-grade learners transitioning away from text-dependent questions and working on developing higher-level thinking and inferential analysis skills.

Posing open-ended questions will help stimulate critical thinking and guide students through the thought process while teaching them what kinds of questions they can ask themselves in future scenarios. Rather than giving students the answers, these guiding questions prompt students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information independently.

Here is a list of questions you can use to scaffold literary analysis.

10. Teach in a Series of Mini-Lessons

When introducing new and complex concepts to your students, consider breaking them down into smaller, more focused lessons. Each mini-lesson should include instruction, modeling, and guided practice that target specific learning outcomes.

This structure will give students the opportunity to concentrate on one element at a time, making complex concepts more manageable. Meanwhile, you will have opportunities to assess student understanding along the way, providing additional instruction or support as needed before moving on.

11. Utilize Thinking Stems

For some students, the biggest roadblock is figuring out how to articulate their thoughts. They have an idea of what they want to say but need help figuring out how to say it. Providing students with thinking stems in a simple yet effective scaffolding strategy that ​​offers a starting point during discussions or written responses.

Thinking stems serve as a scaffold for students to articulate their thoughts more effectively, helping them overcome the challenge of initiating responses by providing a structured starting point. This strategy promotes critical thinking and communication skills, encouraging students to express their ideas with greater clarity and coherence.

When In Doubt, Chunk It Out

Here’s the bottom line: breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks makes learning more accessible for all students. Whether closely analyzing a text or preparing for a challenging writing assignment, breaking things down and providing guidance along the way helps prevent information overload and supports student understanding.

While it may take a little more time and planning, the results are worth it—trust me. Scaffolding will lead to student confidence, independence, and, ultimately, success. I mean, come on—what more could we ask for?

What scaffolding strategies have you used in your classroom? Share them in a comment below!

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Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English pp 41–70 Cite as

Scaffolding the Construction of Academic Literacies

• Simon Green 2  
• First Online: 01 February 2020

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Green considers key policy questions in the planning of academic literacy instruction in higher education. Green first considers the nature of scaffolding in academic literacy and then considers three questions: Who should receive academic literacy instruction? How discipline-specific should academic literacy instruction be? What focal areas should academic literacy instruction consider? Green argues for universal academic literacy instruction; for discipline-specific instruction; and for instruction that focuses on context, genre and rhetorical practice.

• Universal academic literacy provision
• Discipline-specific instruction
• Literacy context
• Rhetorical practice

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Scaffolding argumentative essay writing via reader-response approach: a case study

• Mojgan Rashtchi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7713-9316 1  

Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education volume  4 , Article number:  12 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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The variety of activities and techniques suggested for improving the writing skill shows that EFL/ESL learners need scaffolding to gain mastery over it. The present study employed the reader-response approach to provide the assistance EFL learners require for writing argumentative essays. Five upper-intermediate EFL learners in a private class participated in the qualitative case study. The participants were not selected from the fields related to the English language and did not have any previous instruction on literary texts. During the treatment that took 20 sessions, each session 2 h, the participants read five short stories. Different classroom activities were used as sources of information, which helped the researcher to collect the required data. The classroom activities consisted of group discussions, writing tasks, and responses to the short stories that helped the learners to reflect on the short stories. Think-aloud protocols helped the researcher to learn about the participants’ mental processes during writing. The semi-structured interviews provided the researcher with the information necessary for a deeper understanding of the efficacy of the classroom procedure. As the results of the study showed, successful writing requires manipulation of meta-cognitive strategies and thought-provoking activities. Although the findings of the study cannot be generalized, they can inspire EFL/ESL teachers and material developers to seek a variety of procedures in their approaches to teaching writing.

Introduction

EFL/ESL learners encounter enormous challenges for mastering the writing skill, which is essential to learning the English language. One source of the problem is traceable to the learners’ inefficiency in self-expression. Usually, language learners do not know how to verbalize their ideas, nor do they know how to organize their thoughts and write about a subject. In writing classes, learners not only should be instructed on the mechanics of writing, but also they should be taught how to use thinking skills. As Kellogg ( 1994 ) argues, “thinking and writing are twins of mental life” (p. 13), and writing requires tasks such as problem-solving, decision-making, and reasoning. Writing about what one knows, as Kellogg argues, is a self-discovery as much as it is one way of communication with others. However, excellence in writing requires excellence in thinking and requires systematic thinking ( Paul, 1993 ). One should be able to arrange one’s thoughts in a progression that makes it accessible to others.

High-quality writing, then, is produced by someone with specific standards for both thinking and writing. As Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan ( 1980 ) assert, “if the thinking that goes on in a conversation is densely structured and textured, that which goes in the act of writing can be even more so” (p. 14). For successful writing, student-writers not only should express viewpoints but also they need to provide logical reasons, support their ideas, and organize them. Therefore, one requirement in teaching writing to EFL/ESL learners is to employ techniques and strategies that can enhance the thinking skills of the student-writers. The reader- response approach in the present study was implemented to do so.

Besides, one issue that Iranian EFL learners confront is the difference between the organizational patterns of English and Persian argumentative texts, which magnifies the challenge they encounter while writing. As found by Ahmad Khan Beigi and Ahmadi ( 2011 , p. 177), Persian paragraphs are circular, metaphorical, and follow “Start-Sustain-Turn-Sum” structure, whereas English argumentative essays are straightforward and linear and follow “Claim-Justification-Conclusion or Introduction-Body-Conclusion” pattern. Also, contrary to English students who write “monotopical” essays, which add “unity to the overall paragraph organization”, Iranian students tend to use more than one topic sentence and thus write multi-topical paragraphs as the result of the influence of different organizational patterns of English and Persian (Moradian, Adel, & Tamri, 2014 , p. 62; Rashtchi & Mohammadi, 2017 ). Thus, reflection and response to literary texts were manipulated to help the EFL participants in the present study overcome the two-fold problem they might encounter in argumentative essay writing.

Using literature is by no means a novel idea in ESL/ EFL classes and has been extensively discussed by several scholars in the field (e.g., Gajdusek, 1988 ; Oster, 1989 ; Spack, 1985 ). The present study differs from the previous ones due to its underlying assumption that employing a scaffolded reader-response approach can change writing “from an intuitive, trial-and-error process to a dynamic, interactive and context-sensitive intellectual activity” (Hyland, 2009 , p. 215). In this endeavor, reading short stories and creating personal interpretations could shape the participants’ viewpoints, organize their thoughts, and help them produce compositions that conform to the English language structure.

Literature review

The role and use of literature in teaching writing have been a source of controversy in the studies related to the writing skill. Belcher and Hirvela ( 2000 ) in their comprehensive article about employing literature in L2 composition writing found the manipulation of literary texts in writing classes to be questionable, demanding further exploration despite all efforts to link writing and literature. One way to connect literature and writing is Rosenblatt’s ( 1938 ) reader-response approach that Belcher and Hirvela refer to it as one way, which can reduce the problems of using literature in the classrooms. Spack ( 1985 ) also maintains that in writing classes reading literature encourages learners “to make inferences, to formulate their ideas, and to look closely at a text for evidence to support generalizations” which leads them to think critically (p. 721).

Furthermore, Shafer ( 2013 , p. 39) maintains that if teachers decide to use literature in writing classes, “it should be approached in an inclusive, reader response method so that students have the opportunity to transact with the text and shape it.”

The reader response approach employs literary works in the English language classes and focuses on the reader rather than the text or as Rosenblatt ( 1976 ) conceptualizes, considers a creative role for the reader (p. 42). Therefore, it gives value to the reader as the driving force who can create meaning (Grossman, 2001 ) and provide new interpretations to a literary text. As Smagorinsky ( 2002 ) argues, in the reader-response approach, learners enrich the topic under scrutiny by their “previous experiences” and thus establish an “understanding of themselves, the literature and one another” (p.25). A critical characteristic of the reader-response approach is perspective-taking. According to Chi ( 1999 ), literary texts are not for teaching form and structure; preferably, they are a conduit of encouraging learners to read critically, to extract their understanding of a text, and as Rosenblatt ( 1985 ) maintains, to organize their thoughts and feelings when responding to them. The unique characteristic of the reader response approach, which values the readers’ interpretations of a text due to emotions, concerns, life experiences, and knowledge they have can connect literature and writing.

A review of the related literature shows that the approach has been employed in English language classes to examine its effect on learners’ understanding of literature as well as on developing linguistic and non-linguistic features. For example, Carlisle ( 2000 ) studied the effect of creating reading logs on the participants’ reading a novel while Gonzalez and Courtland ( 2009 ) explored how by the manipulation of the reader-response approach for reading a Spanish novel, the participants could learn the language, appreciate the cultural values, and improve their metacognitive reading strategies. Dhanapal ( 2010 ) reported that using reader-response could enhance the participants’ critical and creative thinking skills. Also, Khatib ( 2011 ) used the approach for enhancing EFL learners’ vocabulary knowledge and reading skills though she could not find a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups. In another study, Iskhak ( 2015 ) reported that the participants’ personality characteristics and L2 speaking and writing improved as the result of participating in reading a novel and responding to it.

The researcher was particularly interested in examining how the participants’ mental processes after reading and reflecting on literary texts could help them in writing. She used group discussions and personal reflective writings as stimulators of thinking ability that seem to be responsible for creating good-quality essays. Thus, the reader-response was viewed as a starting point that could stimulate reflection, and if scaffolded by group discussions and writing tasks, it could enhance the elements of thinking necessary for providing argumentation in writing. Moreover, the classroom procedure was intended to help the participants adjust their essays to the rules (related to mono-topicality) of English writing. Multiple forms of data collection were employed for the present qualitative case study whose purpose was to describe a “phenomenon and conceptualize it” (Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2003 , p. 439).

Contrary to what is suggested by scholars regarding the occurrence of qualitative studies in natural settings (e.g., Creswell, 2013 ; Dornyei, 2007 ), this research was conducted in a classroom. The justification, according to Gall et al. ( 2003 , p. 438), is that in occasions where “fieldwork is not done, the goal is to learn about the phenomenon from the perspective of those in the field.” Thus, the following research questions were proposed to fulfill the objectives of the study:

RQ1 : How does the reader-response approach operate in writing argumentative essays?

RQ2 : How do the participants proceed with writing argumentative essays after reading short stories?

RQ3 : How do the participants’ essays before and after the treatment compare?

Participants

Participants were five Iranian EFL learners who participated in a private writing class. Table  1 shows their demographic information. As the table shows, they had studied English for several years and had started learning English from childhood.

Meanwhile, all of them were attending language classes in different institutes in Tehran at the upper-intermediate level. However, they asserted that they needed individual instruction in the writing skill. The participants did not have any significant academic encounter with the English literature before the study.

The teacher was the researcher of the study. Her B.A. degree in English language and literature, the literature courses she had passed as the requirements of her M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics had provided her with a background in English literature. Additionally, teaching literature courses such as Oral Reproduction of Short Stories, Introduction to English Literature, and English Prose and Poetry in the university where she was a faculty member, had drenched her with the necessary knowledge to instruct the classes. Besides, teaching writing courses for more than 15 years, and publishing papers related to the writing skill gave her insight regarding teaching the skill.

Data collection

The researcher triangulated the study by different types of data obtained from several sources. First, an English proficiency test consisting of 20 vocabulary items, 30 structures, and three reading passages each followed by five comprehension questions extracted from TOEFL Test Preparation Kit ( 1995 ) was used to ensure the participants’ homogeneity regarding the English proficiency level. The reason for using an old version of the test was to control the practice effect, as the participants were familiar with more recent versions.

Also, the participants were expected to write an essay on “ Is capital punishment justified?” as both the pre and post writing tests in 250–300 words which could help the researcher have a clear understanding of their writing ability before and after the treatment. However, the researcher did not intend to go through any inferential statistics, as the study was a qualitative one.

To select a controversial topic of writing which could persuade the student-writers to provide argumentations, the researcher prepared a list of ten topics and asked ten colleagues and ten students to mark the most challenging one. Thirteen of the respondents selected the topic related to capital punishment. Some of the other topics were, “Do we have the right to kill animals ?” “ Education must not be free for everyon e,” and “ Internet access must be limited. ”

A writing rubric (Allen, 2009 ) was used for correcting the essays (Additional file 1 ). The rubric considers four levels (No/Limited Proficiency, Some Proficiency, Proficiency, High Proficiency) across five characteristics of originality, clarity, organization, support, and documentation. The participants’ scores were obtained by adding the points for each level of writing, ranging from 1 for No/Limited Proficiency to 4 for High Proficiency. The researcher and a colleague of hers who had also taught writing classes for about 10 years rated the essays. They negotiated on the merits and shortcomings of each essay and finally agreed on a quality mentioned in the rubric.

The next source of information was students’ reflective responses written after reading the short stories. In these responses, the participants attempted to relate the stories to their personal experiences or write about their feelings, thoughts, and attitudes toward the stories.

Think-aloud protocols were also used as an instrument for data collection. Although according to Bowles ( 2010 , p. 3), “requiring participants to think aloud while they perform a task may affect the task performance and therefore not be a true reflection of normal cognitive processing,” its positive outcome cannot be denied. As Hyland ( 2009 , p. 147) sustains, despite criticisms against think-aloud protocols, they are used extensively in different studies since “the alternative, deducing cognitive processes from observations of behaviour, is less reliable.” Thus, the participants were trained on thinking aloud before the data collection, and then during the study, they were encouraged to report their thought processes while engaged in writing.

Another tool for data collection was a semi-structured interview conducted after completing the circle of reading each short story. The interviews were recorded and analyzed to enable the researcher to explore the participants’ learning experience (Additional file 2 ).

The researcher selected five thought-provoking short stories of high literary merits to initiate class discussions and elicit responses from the participants. The stories were The Lottery (Jackson, 1948 ), The Rocking Horse Winner (Lawrence, 1926 ), The Storm (Malmar, 1944 ), The Last Leaf (Henry, 1907 ), and Clay (Joyce, 1914 ).

Furthermore, the researcher prepared some tasks based on each story to help the participants practice writing and thinking skills (Additional file 3 ). Section A of the tasks required the respondents to organize the sentences according to the sequence of occurrence in the story. Section B asked the students to complete some incomplete sentences with “because,” and Section C consisted of “ WH” questions. Both sections required the learners to think and reason. The participants were expected to complete the three-step tasks after reading each story.

The classes were held in fall 2018. The instruction took 20 sessions, each week, two sessions, and each session 2 h. Before the advancement of the study, the researcher explained the classroom procedure and obtained the participants’ consent regarding the teaching/learning procedure. Then they took the general proficiency and the writing tests to provide the researcher with an estimation of their English language level. In the three subsequent sessions, the researcher gave instructions on English essay writing and discussed the characteristics of an excellent essay. The samples of high-quality and weak essays presented during the instruction could elucidate the characteristics of argumentative essays. The first short story ( The Lottery ) was introduced in session four, which the learners were asked to read before the succeeding session.

In class, first, the researcher asked the participants to take turns and read the story aloud because as Gajdusek ( 1988 ) argues, “many clues to meaning are conveyed by intonation and other expressive devices available” (p. 238). Then some time was allocated to the reflection on the story that could lead to the intellectual involvement of the participants. In the next step, the class followed group discussions through which the learners struggled to verbalize their responses to the story. In this stage, the researcher encouraged talking about viewpoints and emotional states that the learners experienced after reading the story. Following Sumara ( 1995 ), the researcher took part in the discussions to show some of her understanding from the text, although she tried to be concise and give most of the discussion time to the learners. Through comments and questions, the researcher intended to encourage the participants to share ideas with classmates.

After the group discussion, which usually took about 45 min, based on the reader-response treatment, the learners wrote about their feelings and views without trying to stick to the rules of writing such as organization, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, and the like.

In the subsequent session, the researcher asked the student-writers to refer to their notes before doing the tasks. The tasks had a twofold purpose. First, they aimed to help learners organize their thoughts by reflecting on the story. Second, they enabled the learners to relate the stories to their personal experience and understanding. Once the participants completed the tasks, they were invited to agree about a topic more or less related to the theme of the story and start writing a five-paragraph essay. The researcher corrected the essays based on the writing rubric and returned them in the next session (Additional file 1 ). While the learners were involved in writing, each session, the researcher asked two or three of them to participate in the think-aloud process.

The third session was devoted to interviewing the learners. Each interview took about five to 10 min. The participants started re-writing their essays based on the corrections after the researcher explained about their mistakes and errors. Table  2 summarizes the order of presenting the stories and topics attempted in the class.

Table 3 demonstrates the classroom procedure in each session.

The researcher used the data derived from group discussions, reader-responses, think-aloud protocols, and interviews to answer the first and second research questions. For answering the third research question, the quality of the essays written before and after the treatment was compared.

Group discussions

Before reading the first story, the participants were cynical regarding the usefulness of reading literature. They believed that the texts were too complicated; reading them was time-consuming and required skills different from the ones necessary for writing. However, after the first group discussion on The Lottery , they were excited. Some of the comments were:

“ The discussions help us express the feelings and emotions [which were] there inside but couldn’t find their way out, ” “ Classes lower my anxiety,” and “While reading, I felt I was in a different world forgetting [my problems].”

The discussions began with some challenging questions written by the researcher on the board. As the classes proceeded, the participants showed interest in the activity by listening to classmates, expressing viewpoints, and providing arguments. After reading the Lottery , Nima said:

“ I was shocked when I read the story, the name of the story implies something good, but something awful happened … how amazing! ”

Maryam added:

“ It’s like life when you expect good things and bad things happen .”

Azin looked at the story from a different perspective:

“ How selfish people can be, exactly like what happens nowadays, we keep silence until something injures [us].”

And Melika believed:

“ Others’ miseries are a relief for us … how cruel human beings can be, and this is true even in today’s civilized world.”

When reading Clay , Nima said:

“ I was expecting something unusual to happen, something which needs thinking and interpreting , I was sure clay implied something…not expecting .”

Ali asserted that he could understand literature better, could go beyond words, think more profound, and analyze the events in the short stories. The group discussions showed that the participants connected themselves with the stories and characters, and although they were unfamiliar with the English literature, they started appreciating the literary values of the stories.

Another advantage of the classes was the mental relief they caused as reflected in Melika’s words:

“ It is interesting to read about people who do not worry about the messages on their cell phones!”

One crucial point in the class discussions was the improvement of vocabulary knowledge. The participants sought to use words and phrases they had encountered in the stories. They asserted that reading and discussing literary texts helped them remember words with more ease. Besides, the discussions gave them self-confidence in self-expression and overflow of feelings. Maryam emphasized the role of group discussions in shaping her thoughts:

“ They [group discussions] were constructive; made me think and get familiar with others’ views … sometimes you think there is only one way of looking at something … then you find out … issues which you had never thought about before .”

Sharing ideas gave learners the courage to reason, evaluate, justify, agree, and disagree. Expressing agreement and disagreement regarding an issue was an achievement for the learners because it helped them while writing essays.

Another advantage of the group discussions was that they enhanced attention to the details. As the classes proceeded, the participants were conscious of the details mentioned in the stories, and tried to relate them to the plot and characters of the story and tried to infer the meaning they implied. For example, Maryam said:

“ The storm has a double meaning; it refers both to the weather and her inner feelings.”

Melika mentioned:

“ Drooped shoulders show how anxious she was .”

Azin referred to a sentence from the story (But now, alone and with the storm trying to batter its way in, she found it frightening to be so far away from other people) and stated :

“The storm inside her was destroying the image she had built of her life...now she was trying to find someone to stick … watching the imaginary heaven breaking … into pieces.”

The following excerpt is an example from group discussions on Clay to show how the class progressed in answering the leading question: “ How do you feel about Maria ?”

Azin: I think she is an unmarried middle-aged woman … I sympathize with her. Maryam: Why? … … .. why sympathize ? Azin: Because she is not married. Maryam: Is not being married a reason for sympathizing with someone? Melika: No, not marriage … … but loneliness … .. she was very lonely . Ali: Melika is right. Loneliness is too bothering, especially for the old; old age brings worries for people. I always try to show my concern for the elderly. Nima: Good thing to do . But I think some sort of sadness was around her which made me very sad, too…the writer implied kind of nothingness … … after so many years working she had nothing to be happy for. Azin: I do not agree, why nothingness … such is life, 1 day we come [to this world], and 1 day we must go … .this tells us to enjoy life. Maryam: Azin is right. Life is a blessing; we should enjoy every minute of it. Teacher: Let’s try to conclude. Nima … .please, the keywords were loneliness, sadness, marriage, life, and happiness.

Reader-responses

The responses promoted the participants’ focus on the stories. They pointed toward their inner feelings, judgments, preferences, and thoughts about the themes of the stories. They had addressed themselves and the characters and had put themselves in their place. They had used both questions and statements in the responses. Two responses to the Rocking Horse Winner by Maryam and Azin are as follows:

“She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.” There are hundreds of people who can’t have children, you are lucky...Sometimes … we cannot realize how lucky we are, I am most [ly] like that … I should not be !”

“ … they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood.” Feeling you are superior can destroy you … this is what kills human beings. When you think it is your right to have everything and … you forget others … sometimes others deserve but don’t have as much as you .”

Overall, the responses facilitated remembering the sequence of events in the stories. The tasks, together with group discussions, helped the participants organize their thoughts, and thus avoid recursive or cyclical writing. For example, on the first topic, “ The negative role of traditions in our life ,” Melika wrote:

“ Traditions can have both positive and negative roles in our lives. The negative role of traditions is most of the time more dominant though positive roles can be mentioned, as well. The negative role of traditions can cause ignorance, unawareness, and cruelty. Traditions can change the direction of people’s lives and force them to choose ways that are not appropriate. However, traditions can bring about good things, too.”

The writing is recursive as it repeats the idea of negative and positive aspects continuously. However, comparing Melika’s first writing with the last one, “ Superstitions should be abandoned ,” shows her improvement in expressing her idea clearly:

Superstitions are the result of [a] human being’s ignorance. People resort to them when they cannot find solutions to their problems or are not strong enough to face the disasters they encounter.

Additionally, the tasks enhanced reasoning and looking for evidence among the learners. For instance, Ali’s writing on the first topic not only shows his tendency to repeat the same idea but also reveals his lack of reasoning and thus relying on “educated people” and “scholars” to prove himself:

“Educated people never show a tendency toward traditions. Scholars believe that traditions are not scientific, and in today’s world, we must pay attention to scientific findings to solve our problems. The scientific developments help us to be able to live in this modern world.”

However, his introductory paragraph on “the role of motivation in life” showed some argumentation in developing his writing:

“ Motivation seems to have a positive role in our life and can help us to do different activities with less effort and more energy. For example, when we are interested in completing a project, we do not feel tired, but we think about the sense of achievement we will gain .”

Think-aloud protocols

As stated above, think-aloud protocols mainly focused on the participants’ thinking processes while they were engaged in writing. In each writing session, two or three learners participated in the think-aloud procedure. The researcher sat beside one of the participants who had agreed to take part in the thinking protocol. S/he explained the strategies s/he was using or accounted for his/her thought processes. All participants’ voices were recorded by their permission and transcribed for further analysis.

The analyses of the protocols showed that all participants first tried to take a perspective regarding the topic of the writing. The most frequent strategy was self-questioning. They first wrote questions and then answered them. Some questions were, “ What do I think about the topic? Why do I think so? What are my reasons? What is the evidence to support my idea? Are my reasons logical ?” Moreover, they reported that they used mind maps and outlines before beginning to write. Another strategy was using the phrases and words they had extracted and memorized from the texts that, as they asserted, could help them start writing.

Developing an inner dialogue before writing was another strategy used by the participants. Maryam said:

“ I … talk to myself and meanwhile try to write all of the sentences I exchange with myself during the dialogue. Then I organize them .”

Translating from L1, trying to write for an audience and drafting were other strategies used by the participants.

An interesting point mentioned by Maryam, Ali, and Nima was thinking about the stories before writing:

“ … in this way, writing becomes easier .” “ Discovering what you really think about a subject is difficult … I cannot make a decision … but the story is really helpful … it gives direction to my thoughts. ” “ I don’t know how to start my essay, that is why I am trying to review the story in my mind … .”

During the interviews, the participants talked about their learning experience. Their answers to the first interview question showed that they viewed writing a troublesome and challenging activity that needed expertise beyond general proficiency in English. They believed that for effective writing, besides knowledge of the language, learners should learn how to organize their thought processes and transfer them to words. They believed that the classroom procedure gave direction to their thoughts and enabled them to think and write systematically. Some of the advantages of reading literature, as they mentioned, are as follows:

“The use of technology makes me tired; people are always checking something in their cell phones; human relations are weakening … I think reading and sharing ideas is a relief .”

“ Freeing myself from my problems was great … reading stories gave me something different from the routines of life .”

“ The class gave me a reason to talk … something I miss nowadays … I am fed up with reading and writing in the [social network] .”

“ I hate traditional classes they do not give me space to be myself and talk about something different from casual things .”

“ … it was the first time I enjoyed writing because I had ideas to write about. I could [let] myself go.”

Regarding the second question, the learners believed that perspective-taking and organizing ideas were the most demanding tasks while they also maintained that controlling both content and form was difficult. Melika stated:

“ if it were not for grammar, I would have been more comfortable to express myself .”

Moreover, three of the participants (Maryam, Ali, and Nima) pointed to group discussions and mentioned that in the very first sessions, it was difficult for them to express their viewpoints regarding the topic of the discussions, but as the classes continued, they gained the necessary self-confidence. Maryam stated:

“ As the classes started, I was [worried] about my ideas to be irrelevant … I could have seemed funny … but little by little I gained courage to speak out .”

The flow of ideas was considered the most encouraging characteristic of the class (third interview question) for all of the participants. They believed that the short stories were excellent sources of ideas, and responding to them stimulated looking at the themes of the stories from a different perspective. Additionally, listening to classmates was considered encouraging because their opinions inspired confidence, thinking, and appreciation for literature.

Regarding the fourth interview question, the learners pointed to the role of the reader-response approach in boosting thinking skills, shaping ideas, and recovering life experiences. Further, all participants asserted that the approach could enhance inferencing, logical reasoning, and analyzing. They underlined the deep thinking brought about by transferring knowledge from the short stories to their personal lives and believed that by reading and reflecting on the stories, they realized that they had never had the opportunity to think deeply about some of the themes entailed in the stories. Subjects such as greed, selfishness, truth, security, and superstition were the subjects, which triggered thinking and led to a better understanding of human nature, the value of life, and social relations. They underscored the role of the classroom procedure in shaping their ideas and providing them with the input they required for writing.

Writing pretest and posttest

The comparison between the pretest and posttest seemed to be worthy of note. As Table  4 shows, the participants’ writings show a change of status from the pretest to the posttest in the components of the rubric. For example, regarding Originality, the raters witnessed a shift from “Limited Proficiency” in the pretest to “Proficiency” (Azin, Ali, Melika) and from Some Proficiency to “High Proficiency” (Maryam, Nima) in the posttest. Azin wrote the following sentence as the thesis of her essay:

“Capital punishment is a death penalty for wrongdoing.”

While in the posttest, she wrote:

“ Crimes are the result of the pressure society puts on individuals’ minds and souls.”

Maryam’s thesis statement in the pretest was:

“Human beings do not have the right to kill people [for] committing crimes.”

“Crimes are the manifestation of [the] society’s failure in evaluating humanity among its members, and the death penalty is the reflection of the deficiency of social institutions.”

Regarding Clarity, the second criterion in the writing rubric, all participants’ writing showed a shift from “Some Proficiency” to “Proficiency” (Azin, Melika) and to “High Proficiency” (Ali, Maryam, Nima). Ali’s improvement can be shown in the following examples extracted from the pretest and posttest, respectively:

“ Due to the fact that crime is the child of society, it can be studied from different perspectives. Of course, this is relative.”

“Crimes are the result of social injustice, and factors such as poverty, unemployment, and lack of enough education are responsible for leading people toward committing crimes. However, the question is whether the death penalty is the only solution against criminals.”

However, considering the fifth criterion, the Use of Sources/Documentation, the participants did not show much improvement. Their writings showed a shift from “No/Limited Proficiency” to “Some Proficiency” which could be due to the lack of enough time, not having access to different sources while writing, and not having enough practice in using references and quotations from other sources.

Table 5 presents the participants’ scores obtained from the proficiency test and the writing pretest and posttest. The writing scores signify improvement. It is worth mentioning that although the present study was a qualitative one, quantification was used for clarification since “numerical descriptions can make it readily apparent … why researchers have drawn particular inferences” (Mackey & Gass, 2005 , p. 182).

The data gathered from the diverse sources were employed to answer the first research question of the study. Group discussions were useful in helping the participants listen to others and get acquainted with their viewpoints. Listening to classmates exposed learners to a plethora of ideas, helped them avoid biases (Lipman, 2003 ), and enabled them to provide arguments and counterarguments. Reading short stories facilitated writing as they took the role of brainstorming before writing activity and gave direction to the learners’ thoughts (Spack, 1985 ).

The reader-response approach, accompanied by other classroom activities provided appropriate mental exercises that could activate the participants’ thinking skill. In line with Paul ( 1993 ), this study implies that thinking is a potential that needs to flourish through appropriate mental exercises. The reader-response approach can encourage learners to reflect on what they read and to decide on their perspective. The integration of reading literary texts and reflecting on them enhance focus on the sequence of events, promote inferencing, and thus, as Rosenblatt ( 1976 ) argues, help learners, become agents who give meaning to the text they read.

Moreover, the reader-responses could help learners become “conscious of the reasons and evidence that support this or that conclusion” (Lipman, 2003 ). In line with Kellogg ( 1994 ), this study supports the idea that writing and thinking are intertwined skills and improving writing skills is connected to fostering the thinking ability of learners. In the same vein, Oster ( 1989 , p. 100) also connects literature, critical thinking, and writing as she asserts that when students engage in discussing what they have read, they “develop the capacity to see” things with more precision and intensify their “seeing” by writing.

The think-aloud protocols and answers to the interview questions showed that the participants enjoyed reading the literary texts and believed that the texts could shape their awareness toward the details that they commonly fail to attend while encountering different issues in the real-life. Moreover, they successfully related the themes of the stories with their personal experiences, which could facilitate their perception and recall (Sherman, 2013 ).

Likewise, the data gathered from the think-aloud protocols and interviews enabled the researcher to answer the second research question of the study. The analysis of the learners’ answers revealed that connecting writing and literature could turn writing to a meaningful task which prevents the student-writers from becoming “passive recipients of teacher-driven models and assignments” (Shafer, 2013 ). The participants’ use of metacognitive strategies (e.g., self-questioning, outlining), which was stimulated by the writing activity after reading short stories shows that personal interpretations and reflection can activate the cognitive structure of student-writers. Furthermore, the emergence of inner-dialogues after reading activity shows that short stories could cultivate reflection, analysis, and inferencing.

The comparison of the students’ writing before and after the manipulation of the reader-response approach was employed to answer the third research question. As the writings signified, the learning process implemented in the study was successful in improving the participants’ writings regarding originality, clarity, organization, and reasoning.

As stated in the introduction section, one problem with Iranian EFL learners’ writings is “multi-topicality and the use of different forms of parallelism” (Ahmad Khan Beigi & Ahmadi, 2011 ; Moradian et al., 2014 ; Rashtchi & Mohammadi, 2017 ) which originates from their thinking structure and their first language. The planned classroom procedure employed in this study could improve learners’ writings because it was a practice for organized and linear thinking. This account finds support from Wegerif ( 2006 , p.17) who believed that the teaching of thinking skills “needs to be carefully contextualized to be effective.” The study suggests that thinking skills, triggered by the reader-response approach, can be transferred to the writing skill. In line with Rashtchi ( 2007 ) and Topping ( 2001 ), the present study states that one way of teaching thinking skills is through another transferable skill such as reading and writing.

Conclusions

Written tasks and group discussions scaffold the reader-response approach and lead to productive outcomes in thinking and writing. This study suggests that reflection and response cannot turn into writing skill automatically. The various data gathering tools clarified that the reader-response is a thought-provoking activity and can stimulate the employment of thinking strategies. The classroom procedure adopted in this study was a carefully designed activity to improve learners’ writing by tapping their thinking skills.

The present study was a small-scale study, which aimed to probe its participants’ mental processes and report how they reacted toward reading literature, reflecting, and writing. The aim of this study was not to generalize findings but to encourage teachers to employ a variety of techniques and procedures to help their students improve their language skills.

Availability of data and materials

The data and materials will be available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the participants who voluntarily took part in this study and who kindly consented to cooperate in the data collection procedure, including think-aloud and interview sessions. Following their request, although I cannot mention their full names, I do appreciate what they did to make this study possible.

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Writing Rubric. Northeastern Illinois University (Adapted from B. Walvoord by Allen, 2009 ).

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Sample Task. The Lottery (Shortened to meet word limits).

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Rashtchi, M. Scaffolding argumentative essay writing via reader-response approach: a case study. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 4 , 12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-019-0078-2

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An empirical study on the scaffolding Chinese university students’ English argumentative writing based on toulmin model

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In first language studies, the Toulmin model of argumentation has become a prominent analysis and assessment method for English argumentative essays. However, there hasn't been much study on using argument theory to scaffold teaching in practice in second language classrooms. As a broad group of English learners, Chinese university students face numerous challenges when writing argumentative essays in English. As a result, in order to broaden the writing pathway for second language learners, this study employs the Toulmin argumentation model as a pedagogical scaffold. The effects of the argumentation model as a pedagogical scaffold on students' argumentative essay writing were examined on the pre-test and post-test results from both experimental and control groups. Overall scores and argumentative elements in terms of quantity, type, and quality were examined respectively. The mixed-effects model revealed that introducing the Toulmin model of argumentation into the scaffolding method had a significant impact on most argumentative elements in students' writing. The practical pedagogical implications and effects of Toulmin argumentative model have been discussed in detail in this paper.

English argumentative writing; Second language; Toulmin model; Scaffolding; Argumentative elements.

1. Introduction

Argumentation is a tool that students need to use when undertaking argumentative writing tasks ( McCann, 1989 ; Ebadi and Rahimi, 2018 )and an approach adopted to comprehend and emphasize the importance of a certain subject ( Kuhn, 2005 ).

It is a reasoning process that boosts problem-solving and knowledge construction ( Duschl and Osborne, 2002 ; van Eemeren et al., 2002 ). Acquiring the ability of argumentation is essential for students, hence academic institutions focus on polishing this skill ( Kuhn & Moore, 2015 ).

Argumentative writing is not only a focus in first language learning, it is now gradually coming into the view of second language writing researchers as well ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ; Paek and Kang, 2017 ), with research showing that students are weak in developing arguments in both first and second language writing ( Hirose, 2003 ).

English argumentative writing is the focus of all proficiency tests (the IELTS and TOEFL exams), but it is the weakest point for Chinese college students. Main current studies of second language writing have long focused on vocabulary, grammar and coherence in argumentative essays ( Yang and Sun, 2012 ). However, researchers have continued to suggest that the improvement of argumentative writing cannot be achieved solely at the linguistic level ( Stratman, 1982 ). Many students are still stuck in the idea of “fixed template” writing ( Yu et al., 2021 ). It seems that the language level and improvement of template composition alone cannot solve the problem of improving the quality of argumentation, because there are some problems in students' writing, such as the lack of argumentative elements, or the weak connection between argumentative elements. For example, counterarguments and rebuttals are barely shown in argumentative writings ( Felton and Herko, 2004 ; Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ). In terms of the construction of argumentation, students lack knowledge of effective argumentation and are therefore unable to combine relevant evidence and claims effectively to form a complete argumentative structure ( Koh, 2004 ). Inadequate argumentative skills are evident in students' difficulties in finding relevant evidence to support their claims ( Felton and Herko, 2004 ), therefore they are unable to combine evidence and reasons effectively ( Fan and Chen, 2021 ; Nussbaum, 2002 ).

Argumentative writing is at the marginal position of the field of second language writing for a long time. The most direct embodiment is that writing teachers lack writing training related to argumentation ( Hirvela, 2017 ), therefore it is difficult for them to include specific instruction related to argumentation in their writing instruction ( Newton et al., 1999 ). According to Myskow and Gordon (2010) , too much exposure to textual structures may be harmful to English language learners and may hinder their ability to develop as writers. Besides, writing teachers can barely provide support on argumentation for their own concepts of argumentation elements are vague. For example, writing teachers only use vague words involving argumentation to give feedback to students' writing ( Lea & Street, 1998 ; Mutch, 2003 ), the teachers’ conceptual uncertainty results in useless guidance and insufficient argumentation instruction ( Wingate, 2012 ).

Hirvela (2017) suggests that whether argumentation is viewed as a product or as process, teachers and students need to primarily understand the concept of argumentation and therefore, it is urgent to explore the paradigm of teaching second language argumentative writing.

Toulmin (1958, 2003) proposed a model of argumentation (Toulmin model) that has been widely cited by researchers ( Connor, 1990 ; Knudson, 1992 ; Scardamalia and Paris, 1985 ). It is often used as an analytical framework or a pedagogical scaffold for the teaching of argumentative writing in the first language. In the few studies that have applied the Toulmin model as an analytical tool to students' second language essay writing, researchers have found that students are missing key elements of argumentation ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ), and several studies have shown that the overall quality of the essay is related to the elements of argument ( Connor, 1990 ; Ferris, 1994 ; Knudson, 1992 ).

According to Swales (1990) , Students need the content and formal schemata to create acceptable innovations to a genre. A schemata are necessary for the proper presentation of the writer's standpoint and deal with the genre's rhetorical components, such as structure, style, and register. While the field of writing has emphasized that argumentative essays and reasoned argumentation are closely related, pedagogical approaches to this issue have rarely been mentioned ( Dornbrack and Dixon, 2014 ), we thus draw a preliminary conclusion that existing research on second language argumentative essay writing lacks a framework for assessment and pedagogical scaffolding of argumentation. There is also a lack of basic argumentative training for ESL teachers of writing ( Hirvela, 2017 ; Fan and Chen, 2021 ). The inclusion of scaffolding in the teaching of second language argumentative writing to improve students' argumentative skills is an urgent issue facing English language courses in Chinese universities today.

2. Literature review

Hirvela (2017) maintained that until quite recently EFL learners' argumentative writing had been undervalued, but now it is felt to be a prerequisite for writing proficiency. Due to the growth of second language writing, argumentative genre has gradually gained its rightful place in second language learning contexts. While the argumentation theory and pedagogy of the first language essay have been steadily developing in recent years ( Andrews, 2010 ; Crammond, 1998 ; Kelly and Takao, 2002 ; Erduran et al., 2008 ; Nussbaum, 2008 ), little attention has been paid to developing teaching and theoretical issues of the second language argumentative writing.

Argumentation has important implications in terms of curriculum and the cognitive development of students. From a curriculum design perspective, argumentation has gained worldwide attention in recent years. From the perspective of developing cognition, argumentation involves the overt exercise of reasoning ( Billig, 1987 ; Kuhn, 1992 ), and courses involving argumentation will require students to externalise their thinking. This externalisation activity increases student reflexivity and promotes the development of knowledge, beliefs and values. With the aid of teaching of argumentation, students can be provided with a deeper understanding of the relationship between evidence and warrants and their critical thinking skills can be promoted ( Quinn, 1997 ).

A review of the relevant literature suggests that the Toulmin model has been used either as a framework for analysing argumentative texts or as a pedagogical tool to familiarise learners with developing a rich argumentative structure because of the powerful analytical and flexible explanatory power of this framework for argumentative essays ( Hsu et al., 2015 ; Slater and Groff, 2017 ).

Because of its logical clarity and obvious argumentative elements, the Toulmin model of argumentation has been continuously developed and improved by teachers and researchers in recent years, appropriately adapted and applied to the teaching of various subjects ( Erduran et al., 2008 ). In the past two or three decades, teachers and instructors have resorted to this newer treatment of argument structure, Toulmin model thus has been considered as the “a powerful help” for structuring the argumentative essay ( Magalhães, 2020 ). It is also considered to be a “backone” for the development of an essay curriculum (Ellis, 2015). The prevalence of Toulmin model can be accounted Toulmin's basic constituents (claim, data, warrant, backing, qualifier, and rebuttal) correspond to the structural parts of argumentative writing.

2.1. Toulmin's argumentative model as a scaffold

The concept of 'scaffolding' has become an important perspective in second language teaching and learning since the 1990s as the field of second language studies has expanded ( Boblett, 2012 ). Scaffolding is a metaphor for the temporary assistance that learners receive during interactions with experts or peers as they learn new skills, concepts or improve their cognitive level ( Maybin et al., 1992 ). Its effectiveness depends on whether others provide support within the learner's ZPD ( Hammond and Gibbons 2005 ) to enable the learner to achieve a goal or complete a task within the Zone of Current Development (ZCD) ( Wass et al. 2010 ).

Because scaffolding plays an important role in the learning process, in recent years, second language writing researchers have applied various intervention pedagogies based on argumentative theory to argumentative writing, for example, explicit interventions in the classroom such as teaching argumentative basics ( Németh and Kormos, 2001 ), pre-writing debates ( El Majidi et al., 2021 ), process-genre pedagogy ( Huang and Zhang, 2020 ), argumentative writing templates ( Liu & Stapleton, 2020 ), and reader-response approach ( Rashtchi, 2019 ). The underlying principle of these studies is that students need additional support to produce more argumentative elements to gain connections between individual argumentative elements and to gain the ability to challenge the argumentation of others.

Several research articles have incorporated the effects of scaffolding instruction with the Toulmin model on the quality of learners' writing. While helping teachers in various disciplines to organize their argumentation, they have also strongly advanced the development of the Toulmin model of argumentation as a pedagogical scaffold.

For example, Wilson (2014) investigated the effectiveness of scaffolding instruction in the Toulmin model on problem solving and writing quality. The results showed that subjects were able to move from knowledge telling to knowledge translation, i.e. proving claims and providing convincing supporting data. Qin (2013) investigated the effectiveness of the Toulmin model as a pedagogical tool for teaching argumentative writing in an EFL setting. A range of activities were utilized, including explicit instruction, awareness raising and identification of the elements of argumentation. The results of the study showed that students' argumentative essays were richer in content and more complex in argumentative structure. In addition, students reported that the model empowered them to write better argumentative essays in the future. Yeh (1998) examined the effectiveness of instructing two Toulmin-based heuristics on learners' argumentative writing. Yeh (1998) found that the students' improved argumentative skills were reflected in their ability to transfer their knowledge to other topics, rather than having to memorize them by rote. Lunsford (2002) used the Toulmin model as a teaching tool for teaching argumentative writing in a summer composition program for high school students and concluded that the Toulmin model was an effective tool for teaching writing and a useful framework for assessing writers' written output.

Although some scholars argue that it is difficult to identify the various argumentative elements in an essay by relying only on the Toulmin argumentative model as a framework for analysis, a large body of literature in recent years has demonstrated the close relationship between the Toulmin elements and the necessary argumentative elements in an argumentative essay (e.g. Cheng & Chen, 2009 ; Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ; Abdollahzadeh et al., 2017 ; Paek and Kang, 2017 ).

The literature also shows that in many cases, as the actual user of Toulmin model in teaching situations, teachers should not only adjust the model according to their own needs or students' needs, they should also follow the suggestions of researchers (e.g., Bulgren & Ellis, 2012 ; Lin, 2018 ; McNeill et al., 2006 ). Most studies have modified the basic structure of Toulmin's demonstration model to better meet the needs of research ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ; Crammond, 1998 ). On the basis of the original model unchanged, this paper enriches the model as a scaffold by adding key measurable argumentative dimensions. That is to say, based on the expanded form of Toulmin model, as the teaching framework of the experimental group, while exploring new teaching methods, this paper adds new dimensions to the model as the analysis and measurement framework. We expanded the original data part to reason and evidence ( Williams & Columb, 2007 ). In order to more easily locate the opinions and facts produced by students when analyzing the text, we split the original rebuttal part to counterargument and rebuttal ( Qin and Karabacak, 2010 ; Abdollahzadeh et al., 2017 ) in order to more carefully analyze the counterargumentative elements ( Figure 1 ).

The distribution of the argumentative elements in this study.

3. Research questions

Taken the above arguments together, we conducted an intervention study in which we investigated the effects of Toulmin model as a teaching scaffold of Chinese college students in English classes by detecting how much this scaffolding instructional approach improved the overall performance and argumentative elements of the argumentative essay compared to the control group. This study answers the following two research questions.

What is the impact of the Toulmin argumentative model-based scaffolding on?

• 1) students' overall scores and
• 2) the number/type/quality of argumentative elements in their essays?

4.1. Design

To answer these research questions, the authors conducted a quasi-experimental design with a pretest and a post-test with an experimental group and a control group. The first writing was a pretest in which both groups of subjects completed an argumentative essay on the same topic within 30 min in class. The participating teacher was instructed by the authors and was trained on Toulmin as a writing scaffold for teaching. Then the teacher conducted four sessions of scaffolded and traditional instruction on the experimental group and traditional instruction on the control group over the next 4 weeks (see Table 2 ). The participants were also informed about the content of the informed consent form by the authors at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end of the intervention (post-test).

Table 2

Teaching processes on experimental group and control group.

4.2. Participants

The sample for this study consisted of two classes (n = 81) from a university in Tianjin, China. They were from the food engineering and tourism management majors respectively. All students were in their second year of university. There were 45 females and 36 males, ranging from 17 to 19 years old. The majority of all the participants had an A1 level of English in the CEFR framework, as estimated by their English teacher. The basic information of the two groups are shown in Table1 .

Table 1

Basic information of age and gender in the experimental group and the control group.

4.3. Procedure

Two controversial topics were chosen in order to fit the topic of the essay (1) whether it is appropriate to keep marine parks open and (2) whether electronics make people dumber. These two topics are hot topics in Chinese society. The authors chose topics that Chinese students are familiar with because they allow students to develop a fuller argument and show more elements of various types of argumentative elements.

In this way, more characters in argumentative writing can be reflected. Both essay topics had been practised in university classes prior to this study with good results.

In order to ensure the homogeneity of the experiment, first of all, in the first part of the weekly English class, the writing teacher conducted a 45 min traditional teaching method for both the experimental group and the control group at the same time. In the second part of each week's English class (each part lasts 45 min), students in the control group were required to complete a composition in class. In the second part of the weekly English class, the students in the experimental class were given interventional teaching (45 min), and after the second class, a composition was completed in the classroom (see Table 2 ). The post-test composition selected in this paper is the composition of two groups collected after the fourth lecture.

Among them, the traditional teaching content of the first week adopts the method of letting students read the model text aloud proposed by Kaur (2015) , which can be used as the preparation for students to analyze the model text. In the content of the traditional teaching method from the second to the fourth week, the basic teaching of argumentative structure, content and language is adopted ( Oshima and Hogue, 2006 ), which is also a common teaching method for argumentative teaching in Chinese college English classes.

In the process of analysis, the author transcribed each composition into word text, marked the argumentative elements according to the adapted Toulmin argumentative dimensions in Figure 1 . The authors scored the quality of argumentative elements according to McCann (1989) . The rubrics for marking the types of argumentative elements can be seen in Appendix A. A specific operation is shown in Table 3 :

Table 3

Text analysis of Participant 33's writing from experimental group.

The argumentative elements in the two compositions were measured according to McCann's (1989) scoring criteria. The warrants were not marked in the above table, because warrants are implicit. The quality of warrants depends on the logical relationship between reasons + evidence and claims. In the pre-test, the reason 3 of the participant did not form a direct logical relationship with the claim, so its score was 2. In the post test, there was a logical relationship between reason 3 and claim, but the participant did not use evidence to support reason 3, so warrant 3 scored 4 points.

4.4. Interrater reliability

The author adopted CET4 writing standard to assess the students’ essays in terms of relevance, clarity, thoroughness and coherence of their writings. CET 4/6 is the most common type of exam for college students. They can provide an objective and accurate measure of the actual English level of university students. Writing teachers can take them as an assessment tool for the teaching of English writing at university. It is administered by the Department of Higher Education of the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Two experienced raters were invited to score the writings. Rater A, the author, 37 years old, has been a university English teacher at an ordinary university in northeastern China for 5 years. Having participated in CET 4 and CET 6 rating sessions for 9 times, she has rich experience in teaching and rating compositions. Rater B, 39 years old, has been a university English teacher at a top university in northeastern China for 10 years. She has been a rater of CET 4 and CET 6 writings for 13 times. She has a wealth of skills to deal with all stages of writing.

In order to achieve a certain level of marker reliability, the authors first trained and workshopped another marker according to the marking criteria, after which the two marked a portion of the essays together and discussed any inconsistent marks given by the two. The author and the marker negotiated and discussed further according to the marking criteria until they largely agreed. Subsequently, intraclass correlation coefficients in SPSS were used to determine inter-assessor reliability: the overall score for the writing (0.94). In terms of the number of argumentative elements, claim (0.93), qualifier (0.95), reason (0.91), evidence (0.96), warrant (0.84), counterargument (0.95), and rebuttal (0.94). In terms of the types of argumentative elements, claim (0.90), qualifier (0.95), reason (0.84), evidence (0.91), warrant (0.72), counterargument (0.87), rebuttal (0.89). In terms of types of argumentative elements, claim (0.81), qualifier (0.90), reason (0.76), evidence (0.85), warrant (0.81), counterargument (0.92), rebuttal (0.94).

4.5. Statistical analysis

In order to maintain the homogeneity of the two groups to ensure the effectiveness of the comparison between the experimental group and the control group. Therefore, we conducted an independent sample t test on the total scores of the compositions of the experimental group and the control group, as well as each argumentative elements. The test results found that there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of total scores and each argumentative elements in the pretest, which could further ensure the effectiveness of this intervention experiment. The independent sample t-test for the two groups of pre-test is shown in Table 4 .

Table 4

Independent sample t-test between the total scores of the two pre-test groups and each argumentative element.

Because the participants in this study were from different classes, the experimental and control groups each experienced a pre-test and a post-test, involving repeated measures as well as the stratified structural nature of the sample, and the samples were not independent, the authors chose a mixed-effects model. This is because the random effects model in the mixed effects model explains the possible covariance of students from the same class. In the model, the independent variable (the intervention condition and time) was set as a fixed effect and the between-subject and within-subject variation was set as a random effect.

In order to test the effect of the pedagogical scaffolding of the Toulmin model of argumentation on discourse, a combination of the two main factors needs to be taken into account. In other words, the interval between pre-test and post-test (pre vs post) ∗ group (experimental vs control group) was key to the study.

5.1. Two groups of independent sample t-test for each argumentative element in the post test

Table 5 presents table descriptive data (mean scores and standard deviation) for both groups in the post-test. It can be seen from Table 5 that there are significant differences between the experimental group and the control group in each argumentative element and the total score in the post test.

Table 5

Independent sample t-test between the total scores of the two post-test groups and each argumentative element.

5.2. Results of the mixed effects model-overall writing score and each argumentative element

In order to test out the effect of the Toulmin argumentative model of instructional scaffolding on overall performance on the argumentative essay, the paper adopts a mixed effects model calculation. When the intervention condition was significantly different between the two groups, the author applied Cohen's d effect size (ES) to calculate the extent to which the sample size was representative of the entire group of university students. The results of the mixed-effects model are presented in Table 6 , Table 7 and Table 8 .

Table 6

Multilevel analysis results of writing score and the number of argumentative elements.

Numerator df = 1.

Table 7

Multilevel analysis results of the type of argumentative elements.

Table 8

Multilevel analysis results of the quality of argumentative elements.

The writing score was positively affected by the combined two conditions-time and Toulmin argumentative teaching ( Table 6 ). The results of the mixed effects model also show that the Toulmin argumentative model teaching method affected positively on the numbers of reasons (F (1, 81) = 4.685; p = .033)with a moderate ES (0.40), warrants (F (1, 81) = 10.423; p = .002) with a moderate ES (0.41), counterarguments (F (1, 162) = 6.057; p = .015) with a moderate ES (0.36) and rebuttals (F (1, 162) = 5.94; p = .016) with a moderate ES (0.40). The Toulmin argument model teaching method had a positive contribution to the number of argumentative elements.

In Table 7 , the results of the mixed effects model show that the Toulmin argumentative model teaching method affected positively on the types of counterarguments (F (1, 162) = 5.074; p = .026) with a moderate ES (0.44), rebuttals (F (1, 81) = 4.406; p = .048) with a moderate ES (0.28). The Toulmin argumentative model teaching method had a positive effect on the types of counterarguments and rebuttals.

Table 8 demonstrates that the Toulmin argumentative model teaching method affected positively on the quality of claims (F (1, 81) = 8.63; p = .004)with a large ES (0.73), reasons (F (1, 81) = 7.20; p = .009) with a moderate to large ES (0.63), evidences (F (1, 81) = 4.92; p = .029) with a moderate to large ES (0.54), warrants (F (1, 81) = 8.07; p = .006) with a large ES (0.72), counterarguments (F (1, 162) = 6.55; p = .012) with a moderate ES (0.36) and rebuttals (F (1, 81) = 7.89; p = .006) with a low ES (0.20). The Toulmin argument model teaching method had a positive contribution to the quality of argumentative elements.

6. Discussion

In this paper, a quasi-experimental approach was used to teach an intervention based on the Toulmin model of argumentation to an experimental class. A mixed-effects model was used and the results showed that this teaching method contributed to the overall performance of the argumentative essay and to most of argumentative elements.

From the perspective of writing score, the overall performance of the students in the experimental class showed a more significant improvement, which indicates a positive relationship between the argumentative element and the overall quality of the argumentative essay ( Qin and Karabacak, 2010 ; Abdollahzadeh et al., 2017 ). The obvious progress in the total score of the experimental class shows that most of the former second language writing teachers have limited their teaching of writing to the language level, so they may fail to provide logical and structural support for students' argumentative writing ( Wingate, 2012 ), college students have already had the ability to accept argumentation knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to allow students to “unconsciously” learn the complete framework and logic of argumentation while consolidating basic language knowledge through relatively complete infiltration of argumentation framework into traditional teaching. The progress of students' writing score greatly indicates that students need appropriate content and formal schema designed to make allowable innovation on writing ( Swales, 1990 ). Students' familiarity with the logic and framework of overall argumentation will surely be reflected in the output of writing.

In terms of the output of the number of argumentative elements, as shown in the descriptive statistics in Table 4 and Table 5 , the number of argumentative elements in the experimental group has been greatly improved in the post test compared with the pre-test (Claim 1.92–2.16, Qualifier 1.68–1.61, Reason 1.66–2.46, Evidence 1.05–1.64, Warrant 1.66–2.49, Counter argument 0.38–0.80, Rebuttal 0.41–0.84) This shows that students have a strong acceptance of teaching intervention of schemata ( Swales, 1990 ). Students have greatly improved in the two weak aspects of counterarguments and rebuttals, which verified that the classroom writing intervention of point-to-point argumentative elements has a significant effect on students ( Liu & Stapleton, 2020 ).

In the control group, the situation is different (Claim 1.80–1.94, Qualifier 1.33–1.06, Reason 1.51–1.83, Evidence 0.99–1.02, Warranty 1.60–1.80, Counter argument 0.39–0.35, and Retail 0.39–0.38). Although there was also a slight increase in the number of claims, reasons, evidences and warrants written by the control group students, probably because traditional writing instruction still played a role in facilitating argumentative essay writing. However, the control group students showed a decrease in the number of counterarguments and rebuttals. In the traditional teaching method for the control group, the writing teachers did not emphasize the importance of counterarguments in improving the overall quality of writing and it is possible that most students follow their own “template composition” mindset ( Yu et al., 2021 ), therefore, the counterarguments and rebuttals produced in the pre-test writing were not timely guided and decreased in the post test.

Both the experimental and control groups showed a decrease in the number of qualifiers in the post-test. The possible reason for this is that the qualifier is a qualifying and subsidiary component among the argumentative elements, which needs to exist in dependence on the claim. Some studies have shown that high-quality compositions contain less qualifiers because more concise claims make the author's views clearer and help the author to complete more effective argumentation ( Yang, 2022 ). When students' efforts were focused on writing the main body of the argumentative essay, the complexity of the claims appearing in the first and last paragraphs was reduced accordingly.

Taking “time” and “intervention “ as independent variables, they work together to affect the total score of argumentative writing and the number of argumentative elements. The total scores, the number of reasons, warrants, counterarguments and rebuttals have significantly improved under the combined effect of “time” and “intervention “, which shows that the revised Toulmin model “tailored” for argumentative teaching is suitable for classroom teaching and can play a direct and effective role in improving students' writing capacity.

In terms of the types of argumentative elements, as shown in Tables  4 and ​ and5, 5 , except for qualifiers, the types of argumentative elements in the experimental group have been greatly improved in the post test compared with the pre-test (Claim 1.32–1.35, Qualifier 1.28–1.08, Reason 0.99–1.18, Evidence 0.84–1.12, Warrant 1.04–1.14, Counterargument 0.37–0.69, Rebuttal 0.35–0.65), which shows that the interventional teaching ]not only makes a relatively comprehensive contribution to the generation of the number of argumentative elements in writing ( Nussbaum, 2002 , 2008 ; Liu & Stapleton, 2020 ), but also has a positive impact on the diversity of the output of argumentativr elements., In the control group, the situation is different (Claim 1.38–1.39, Qualifier 1.06–0.86, Reason 0.86–1.00, Evidence 0.76–0.74, Warrant 0.99–1.00, Counter argument 0.32–0.31, and Rebuttal 0.36–0.34) Only the types of reason and evidence have slight improvement, other types have declined. The higher the students' writing performance, the less the number of qualifiers they write ( Yang, 2022 ). The less the number is, the less the types are. This is also the reason why the two groups of qualifiers have fewer types. It can be seen from the control group that although the traditional teaching method can positively promote the argumentative elements in quantity, it obviously cannot help students improve the diversity of them.

Under the combined effect of “time” and “intervention”, as shown in Table7 , the types of counterarguments and rebuttals have been significantly improved, which shows that Chinese college students have a clear acceptance of the counterargumentative elements they most lack ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ). Under the situation that Chinese college students' writing is deeply influenced by “template composition” ( Yu et al., 2021 ), the application of Toulmin model in teaching can enable students to make breakthroughs in new dimensions, which is commendable.

In terms of the quality of argumentative elements, as shown in the descriptive statistics in Tables  4 and ​ and5, 5 , except for qualifiers, the types of argumentative elements in the experimental group have been greatly improved in the post test compared with the pre-test (Claim 3.92–5.11, Qualifier 1.70–1.53, Reason 2.14–3.35, Evidence 1.73–2.78, Warrant2.32–3.16, Counter argument 0.41–0.99, Rebuttal 0.47–1.05), which shows that the intervention teaching of argumentative elements has a significant impact on the quality of argumentative elements in writng. In the control group, the situation is different (Claim 3.43–3.64, Qualifier 1.49–1.26, Reason 1.84–2.30, Evidence 1.43–1.68, Warrant 2.05–2.20, Counterargument 0.42–0.48, and Rebuttal 0.65–0.52). The improvement of the quality of argumentative elements is relatively small. The possible reason is that the traditional teaching for a period of time has played a role in improving the students' language level. These advances are reflected in some argumentative elements. The quality of the qualifiers in both groups has not improved. It can be seen that qualifiers attached to claims are not affected by the interventional teaching based on Toulmin model. It is obvious that the quality of rebuttals in the control group has declined, which shows that the traditional teaching method is insufficient in improving the quality of students' argumentative elements.

Except for qualifiers, the quality of other argumentative elements has been significantly improved under the joint action of “time” and “intervention”, as shown in Table 8 , which fully demonstrates the importance of the argumentative teaching method based on Toulmin model in improving the quality of argumentative writing. Previous studies have mostly focused on the relationship between the number of argumentative elements and the quality of argumentation, but the quality of argumentation needs to be determined by combining multiple dimensions of argumentative elements ( Sadler & Fowler, 2006 ). This part provides reference data for comprehensive evaluation of the quality of argumentation.

7. Research direction and limitations

In this study, Toulmin's argumentative pedagogy was infused into the teaching of writing, and a comparison between the experimental and control groups, and between the pre-test and post-test, yielded an improvement in the quantity, quality and type of argumentative elements of the argumentative pedagogy.

While this paper validates the effectiveness of argumentative pedagogy based on Toulmin model, it also has some drawbacks. First, this paper is the first attempt to measure students' argumentative elements in terms of their quantity, type and quality, i.e., it focuses on a large number of dependent variables, however, due to space constraints, it is not possible to specify the state of development of each element. This paper is an innovative study and the details need to be further processed and refined in relation to the data collected. Secondly, the subjects were all from one university in a northern Chinese city, which is not sufficiently representative of Chinese university students as a whole; in the next study, the authors will select subjects in different provinces of China. Third, the number of subjects in the experimental and control groups was relatively small, and in future studies the authors will increase the number of subjects in each of the experimental and control groups.

Improving performance in argumentative essays has always been a major concern for writing teachers and students in language learning. Based on the premise that the Toulmin model of argumentation is applicable as an analytical framework for analyzing students' performance in argumentative essays, this paper incorporates the Toulmin model of argumentation into the teaching of argumentative essays so that students learn both the whole process of argumentation and become familiar with the meaning of each argumentative element. The authors used a mixed-effects model to calculate and analyze the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups. The structure showed that the combination of argument theory and writing instruction had a significant effect on Chinese university students' second language argumentative essay writing.

First of all, it can be seen from the pre-test data of the two groups that students' argumentative writing reflects their argumentative ability ( McCann, 1989 ). On this basis, it is very necessary to provide students with suitable framework teaching.

Secondly, the results of this experiment show that although the total score and some argumentative elements of the control group have also improved under the guidance of the traditional teaching method, some key argumentative elements, such as counterargumentative elements and types of evidence, have not been improved, which indicates that the traditional teaching method is still insufficient in improving the comprehensive ability of argumentation. In contrast, the teaching method based on Toulmin model can play a more comprehensive role in improving the quality of argumentative writing. Finally, previous analytical studies only focused on the relationship between the number of argumentative elements and the overall quality of writing ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ; Abdollahzadeh et al., 2017 ). But the quantity cannot represent the quality. From a more comprehensive perspective, this paper analyzes the changes that the interventional teaching based on Toulmin model can bring about in all dimensions of argumentative elements. Therefore, it is a reference for the transition from an analytical framework ( Qin & Karabacak, 2010 ; Abdollahzadeh et al., 2017 ) to a pedagogical framework.

Declarations

Author contribution statement.

Rui yang: Conceived and designed the experiments; Performed the experiments; Analyzed and interpreted the data; Contributed reagents, materials, analysis tools or data; Wrote the paper.

Funding statement

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council [202100650002].

Data availability statement

Declaration of interest's statement.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

Appendix A. Types of argumentative elements and example

Appendix b. toulmin argumentative scoring criteria - main dimension, appendix c. toulmin argumentative element score criteria - sub-dimensions.

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Scaffolding

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In construction, scaffolding is the wooden and metal apertures used on the exterior of buildings for a variety of projects, from maintenance to construction to restoration. Seeing scaffolding on a structure implies that workers are doing a variety of possible tasks to build, strengthen, or reinforce that structure. Even if a structure is weak or unstable, workers can use scaffolding to rectify the weakness. Scaffolding is never used to purposefully make a structure weaker.

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Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical, Colorblind Past

Films and TV shows keep reimagining history as a multiracial dream world. Is that really a step forward?

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By Kabir Chibber

Not long ago, in the cinema, I found myself trying to focus on Timothée Chalamet’s charming portrayal of a young Willy Wonka, arriving penniless in a new city. What drew my attention instead was the population he encountered there. The first person to greet him was a joyful British Indian. Soon we met a cute orphan sidekick, played by a Black American actor, and the chief of police, played by a biracial American. The vaguely Mitteleuropean city Wonka had come to — Viennese shops, Italian architecture, English language — was a happy melting pot: All races seemed to coexist without race meaning anything. The story was set in a fantastical past, but its cast looked like a utopian 21st-century London, with actors of British and Caribbean and Asian backgrounds all stirred together. The Oompa-​Loompas, described by Roald Dahl as a pygmy people found “in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before,” were played by Hugh Grant.

Across the arts, we now see so many worlds that never existed. David Copperfield is played by Dev Patel. Marvel’s Norse pantheon includes a Black deity. The hit Netflix series “Bridgerton” depicts a version of Regency England ruled by a Black queen and an anachronistically multiracial royal court.

When you see these examples gathered, they’re often followed by some complaint of a world gone mad with inclusion. In Britain, for instance, there was some outrage when the protagonist of an otherwise faithful Agatha Christie adaptation was revised to be a Nigerian immigrant. But the problem, for viewers, isn’t wokeness run amok; it’s the incoherence of the world we are watching. We see an African man solving crimes in a rural English village of the 1950s, as the sun sets on the empire — yet his race is barely mentioned or considered and never makes any material difference in his experience.

You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.

And yet something is off , something that makes these stories impossible to get lost in. You can never fully envision the Magical Multiracial Past without having to mentally take apart the entire scaffolding of world history. “Bridgerton” is set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently exists, largely unmentioned, in the world of the show. What, precisely, are the rules of a world in which a Black queen reigns over a British Empire that sanctions the enslavement of Black people?

Included, But Erased

The impulse behind such choices surely comes from a good place. Storytellers are struggling with how to approach a historically white canon and a set of well-worn genres (like the period costume drama) whose characters would, in reality, be almost exclusively white. They are wary of simply omitting all the other ethnicities that are part of the modern, multiracial West, either as performers or, potentially, as viewers. Neither do they want to tell stories in which nonwhite people must always appear as servants, or victims, or issues.

The Magical Multiracial Past is one optimistic solution to this conundrum. We want to include everyone in our storytelling, but we are not always prepared to change the kinds of stories we tell. So we simply suspend disbelief; we imagine that everyone who is currently a part of our Anglophone culture has been there, a valued and equal participant, all along.

Thus have all of us, from around the globe, been retconned into the history of the West. Now we can watch ourselves speak languages we did not speak in rooms where we were unlikely to have been welcome. We are included, but our actual history is erased. We seldom see the stories of nonwhite people who, like my ancestors, lived on their home soil, or the complex stories of nonwhite people in the West in centuries past. The world’s history is reduced from many to one.

Some feel that this sort of wishful casting can help model how a multiethnic society should function. But whom, precisely, does it benefit? It is convenient that the Magical Multiracial Past allows white viewers to watch white protagonists move through history without anyone having to think uncomfortable thoughts; indeed, the people of the Magical Multiracial Past get along better than we do in the present. I don’t think this is principally for the benefit of those of us who aren’t white. I think instead of a line from James Baldwin: “A great deal of one’s energy,” he once wrote, “is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see.”

And maybe this is why, while I struggle to cope with these revised pasts intellectually, I also think they tend to fail emotionally, deep down in the places a good story is meant to reach. The tales are often boring, marked by a well-meaning blandness — by an avoidance of uncomfortable truths.

Seeing the Canon Afresh

There are alternatives to this fantasy. One obvious option is that, rather than trying to fit the modern world into the canon, we could expand the canon itself. It’s not difficult to tell stories from more parts of the world. In literature, the writer Marlon James has worked to make his Dark Star trilogy, inspired by ancient African folklore, avoid becoming a “European fantasy novel in brown face.” Children’s entertainment offers stories like Disney’s “Moana,” immersed in Polynesian culture, and “Iwájú,” set in a future Lagos. All sorts of films find ways to acknowledge nonwhite people in Western history or to dramatize their histories elsewhere.

Or we can see the canon afresh. You can keep the cowboy but tear it to shreds, as Mel Brooks did with the story of a Black sheriff in “Blazing Saddles.” Or you can rebuild it, as Quentin Tarantino did in “Django Unchained” by making the hero a former slave. (Tarantino called the cruel slave owners of his film a “grotesque parody of European aristocracy,” a far more interesting take on the concept of royalty, in my view, than pretending to be a royal myself.) There is also humor here. A good joke in “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” is rooted in an unacknowledged truth of time-travel stories: It’s mostly people who look like Marty McFly who want to go all that far into American history.

There is nothing wrong with dreaming of things that never were, but we shouldn’t use that power to pretend bad things didn’t happen. Personally, I’m drawn to a good counterfactual. I find myself thinking often about a 1995 film called “White Man’s Burden.” Written and directed by Desmond Nakano, a third-generation Japanese American, the movie places John Travolta in an alternate America in which Black people hold all the power and white people live in drug-filled ghettos. It opens with a lavish, all-Black dinner party at which the head of the table muses about whether white people are, as a race, beyond saving — a reversal heightened by the fact that this bad guy is played, with tremendous charisma, by the civil rights icon Harry Belafonte.

Art should explore our shared history and try to make sense of it. Consider the recent uproar over Google’s artificial-​intelligence model, so trained to produce “colorblind” images that it would offer the ridiculous: the founding fathers as Native American men, racially diverse Nazis. Google’s trillion-dollar team of scientists tried to solve the problems of racism by ignoring them and thereby found their own way to the Magical Multiracial Past. It’s striking to think that humans working in the arts have been making the same choices. The past is messy, and depicting it can be unsettling. But understanding that is what separates us from robots.

Kabir Chibber is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. He last wrote for the magazine about the prophetic power of the film “Demolition Man.”

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