The Discourse Analysis Study Of Scientific Argumentation Teaching

Scientific argumentation is an important scientific practice and an effective way for students to study science as well,which has broadly attracted the attention of scientific education researchers in various countries.Many foreign scholars have paid academic efforts on exploring the way to teach scientific argumentation in the classroom.However there are few relevant empirical researches in China,localized,feasible,and targeted teaching implementation cases and suggestions are needed.Based on such background,this study aims to explore the teaching mode of scientific argumentation,and to try to reveal the development trend of students' argumentation ability under the intervention of argumentation teaching.This study begins with reviewing the literatures of scientific argumentation teaching,and then designs a teaching model that is available to the Chinese science curriculum and suitable for the native science classroom.Then,the argumentation teaching is carried out among 36 six-grade students at the first year of junior middle school in Shanghai.Classes are recorded and videotaped,so as to analyze students' argumentation performance in different stages of the teaching process.According to the research findings,there are some characteristics of the scientific argumentation teaching.In terms of teaching contents,make full use of existing teaching materials,and design open,controversial and contextualized argumentation tasks.In terms of teaching organization,combine the whole class discussion and the group discussion.In terms of teaching process,the steps in the foreign teaching mode are extracted to form the teaching procedures that are suitable for the local teaching situation.The teacher induce students to learn the structure and norms of argumentation by inducing or providing argument elements.Through classroom discourses,it is found that with the development of teaching,the proportion of teacher's discourse of "inducing argument elements" decreases,and the proportion of teacher's discourses of "providing argument elements" is not high atall stages,and the total proportion of scaffolding discourses shows a downward trend.The proportion of students' discourses of “provide evidence or reasons for the assertion” increases;the proportion of “rebuttal” increases,among which “rebutting others' claims” is more;In addition,the proportion of “supportive” increases as well,especially “agree to others” and “provide reasons or evidence for others' arguments”.In group discussions,the unequal participation among members has been alleviated.Students frequently use the “discussion” interaction and rarely “ignore” other students' discourses.In summary,students can construct high-quality arguments by themselves at the end of the course;moreover students' critical ability and social negotiation ability are improved,and students' participation in group discussions is improved.