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Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances. This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered analysis using procedures based off of previous intertextual analysis scholarship and backward mapping processes.

This preliminary study explores how international students bring their cultural knowledge and experiences into relationship with other writers’ ideas as they engage in an online discussion in response to a news text. This article focuses on a language excerpt from an online discussion group, including the assignment prompt, reading text, student responses, and comments to one another within a university ESL composition course. An intertextual analysis suggests that students’ engagement with multiple texts in this dialogic space and the integration of their own cultural resources led to socially constructed learning, relationship building, and a deepened understanding of the source text. This study extends the conversation in Academic Literacies research by illustrating how the construct can be used as a design frame for teaching an academic practice (writing about text) while also deliberately incorporating ways for students to draw upon their cultural identities and resources.

Argumentative writing has long been considered an essential skill for disciplinary learning. For researchers and curriculum developers to develop ecologically valid instructional approaches to argumentative writing, a pivotal prerequisite is the understanding of how teachers use various instructional methods in tandem to teach different argumentative components. This exploratory study identified instructional patterns for the teaching and learning of argumentative writing by observing 187 English language arts class sessions taught by 31 highly regarded high school English language arts teachers (529 students; 40% of the students were males). Multidimensional scaling identified three instructional patterns that vary in the level of teacher centeredness and dialogic interaction. These instructional patterns may reflect the occurrence of explicit teaching, dialogic learning, and in-class writing that was sometimes accompanied with teacher conferencing or coaching. Common across all of these practices was the teaching of claim and evidence. Warranting, counterargument, and response to counterargument, which are more complex forms of argumentation, tended to be taught by instructional practices involving low- to mid-level teacher centeredness and high-level dialogic interaction (e.g., small grouping, discussion). Overall, our findings highlight the gaps between what researchers suggest as effective approaches to teaching argumentative writing and how argumentative writing is currently taught in classrooms.

Introducing a new framework for teaching and learning literature in secondary schools, this book presents Dialogic Literary Argumentation as an inquiry-based approach to engage students in communicating and exploring ideas about literature. As a process of discovery, Dialogic Literary Argumentation facilitates conversation—"arguing-to-learn"—as a method to support students’ diverse perspectives and engagement with one another in order to develop individual and collective understandings of literature and their place in the world. Covering both the theoretical foundation and application of this method, this book demonstrates how to apply Dialogic Literary Argumentation to teach literature in a way that foregrounds dialogue, learning through inquiry, diverse views, listening to others, and engagement with our communities. Ideal for preservice teachers in literacy methods courses and practicing teachers, it features real-world cases, discussions of the principles presented, resource lists, and conversation starters for professional learning communities, professional development, and teacher education.

A widespread instructional practice in the teaching of argumentative writing is the use of writing samples or models during instructional conversations about what counts as “good argumentative writing.” In this article, we focus on a set of lessons in a high school English language arts classroom in order to gain insight into how a teacher’s use of writing samples contributed not only to what counts as “good argumentative writing” in that classroom, but how her instructional conversations with a group of 11th grade students revealed a shift in her “argumentative epistemologies” for teaching literature-related argumentative writing. We examine simultaneously the impact of instructional conversations on the evolution of the socially constructed definitions of good argumentative writing and the teacher’s shifting argumentative epistemologies by tracing the teacher’s socially constructed definitions of good argumentative writing in the instructional conversations around argumentative writing samples as they evolve and change over time. The findings suggest that the interactional construction of “good argumentative writing” in instructional conversations was influenced by the broader instructional context (e.g., a testing regimen), by the teacher’s argumentative epistemologies for what counts as good writing, and by the conversational interaction of teachers and students in classroom lessons.

This study examines how instructional conversations revealed the ways two teachers’ argumentative epistemologies (ideational and social process) shaped literacy events focused on the warranting of evidence. A microethnographic study of the literacy events within each teacher’s respective instructional unit revealed that each teacher’s epistemology shaped how students were asked to consider differing sources, relevancy, and sufficiency for warranting evidence within the context of writing extended argumentative essays. Events within an ideational epistemology required students to generate warrants as ideas to be applied to arguments in on-demand writing situations. Within a social process epistemology, students constructed warrants as a social practice appropriate for a specific rhetorical context. Each teacher supported his or her students in developing differing understandings of the nature of warranting. These findings highlight the importance of analyzing the teaching and learning of argumentative writing not only as written products of instruction but as a socialization into argumentative writing practices.

The chapter applies a languaging relations perspective to describe a teacher’s shift from a formalist focus on structure to teach argumentative writing about literature to a focus on the languaging processes involved in learning to argue/arguing to learn through students’ dialogic interactions about texts.

Across four decades of Arthur Noble Applebee's scholarship in English language arts (ELA), he was concerned with how teachers' curricular and instructional decisions mediate how students learn what counts as "interesting and appropriate, what can be said and how to say it". This chapter explores how an ELA teacher supported her students' learning of what is "interesting and appropriate" about literature through argumentation. It considers how an ELA teacher adapted her developing understanding of literary argumentation across a school year to teach "literary analysis" as part of an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. In the context of the Argumentative Writing Project (AWP) study, the chapter considers "adaptive expertise" for the teaching of argumentation and argumentative writing in a high school ELA classroom. "Macroadaptation" refers to educational programs planned for a particular group of students such as programs in "gifted" education or those in consideration of sociocultural background, as in programs designed as "culturally responsive teaching".

We propose “instructional chaining” as an analytic method for capturing and describing key instructional episodes enacted by expert writing teachers to foster the recontextualization over time of the social practices of argumentative writing through process-oriented instructional approaches. The article locates instructional chaining within a sociocultural framework and argues for conceptualizing learning to write as the recontextualization of social practices of writing in classroom settings. To illustrate the use of instructional chaining to study the effects of teaching on learning argumentative writing, we describe the processes employed to construct an instructional chain for a unit of literary argumentation in a 12th grade English language arts classroom. We conclude with a discussion of two potential uses of instructional chains as units of analysis for both quantitative and qualitative analyses to study patterns of teaching and learning across many classrooms.

Acquiring argumentative reading and writing practices reflects a key component of recent curricular reforms in schools and universities throughout the United States and the world as well as a major challenge to teachers of reading and writing in K–12 and college writing classrooms. In this review, we consider the contributions of two research perspectives, cognitive and social, that researchers have employed in the study of the teaching and learning of argumentative reading and writing. We address two basic questions: How do these perspectives with their own disciplinary frameworks and logics of inquiry interactively inform how researchers study argumentative reading and writing, and consequently, how have these orientations informed pedagogical knowledge that may support teachers’ understanding of what argumentation is and how it may be taken up in the educational contexts? We analyze relevant conceptual and empirical studies by considering assumptions underlying the cognitive and social disciplinary perspectives, especially in terms of the warrants that those perspectives assume. We also interrogate how these perspectives’ logics of inquiry reveal assumptions about the transfer of learning as supported by instruction and other practices, such as classroom discussion, computer-supported collaborations, and other forms of instructional support. Using empirical studies of the teaching and learning of argumentative reading and writing conducted in grades K–12 and college writing classrooms, we delineate the assumptions that drive the two perspectives and their instructional consequences, arguing that researchers and teachers need an understanding of their assumptions about knowledge and transfer to establish a clear and coherent relationship between theory and practice. We offer a vision for research that integrates the cognitive and social perspectives to argue that the work of literacy research is to reveal cognitive processes and instructional practices that teachers can promote and students can employ for learning how to do argumentative reading and writing.

This essay book review of the Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research and Meeting the Challenge of Adolescent Literacy: Research We Have, Research We Need is framed as an argument for dialogism and understanding across differences in the field of adolescent literacy. We focus on the contents of the two volumes by considering three key issues: sponsorship, identity, and agency. We conclude by offering possibilities for understanding the field of adolescent literacy research as a conversational domain. يتم وضع مراجعة الكتابين البحثية هذه وهما دليل الكتاب لأبحاث تعلم القراءة والكتابة الخاصة بالمراهقين والكتاب مواجهة تحدي تعلم المراهقين: الأبحاث لدينا والأبحاث التي نحتاج إليها في إطار حجة بالحوار والتفاهم عبر الاختلافات في مجال تعلم المراهقين القراءة والكتابة. إذ أننا نركز على محتويات الكتابين من حيث ثلاث مسائل رئيسية: وهي التكفل والهوية والتمكين. وننتهي بتقديم احتمالات لفهم مجال أبحاث تعلم المراهقين القراءة والكتابة كمجال مثير للجدل. 本文评论《青少年读写文化研究手册》与《迎接青少年读写文化的挑战：我们有什么研究、我们需要什么研究》这两本书，幷建议在青少年读写领域中提倡对话主义，及从各种差异中寻求相互理解。本文作者就这两本书的内容，考量三个重点：倡议者身分、身分认同及行动性。在结论中，作者提出把青少年读写文化研究理解为对话式的研究领域的可行性。 Cette revue des deux essais Manuel de la recherche sur la litteratie des adolescents et Relever les defis de la litteratie des adolescents: les recherches que nous avons, les recherches qu'il nous faudrait est structuree comme un argumentaire en faveur d'un dialogue et d'une comprehension des differences dans le champ de la litteratie des adolescents. Nous nous centrons sur le contenu des deux ouvrages sous trois angles: le financement, l'identite, l'organisation. Nous concluons en ouvrant des perspectives pour comprendre le champ de la recherche sur la litteratie des adolescents en tant que lieu d'echanges. Читателям представлен обзор двух книг Руководство для исследователей подростковой грамотности; и Как справиться с трудностями, возникающими при обучении подростков: исследования, которые есть, и исследования, которые нужны. В этом обзоре-эссе представлены доводы в пользу диалога ученых, который приведет к более глубокому взаимопониманию между всеми, кто работает на ниве подростковой грамотности. Содержание обеих книг рассматривается в трех ключевых аспектах: Кто финансирует исследования? Кто исследует? Как исследует? В заключение мы описываем, как можно перевести исследования подростковой грамотности в поле конструктивных обсуждений. Este ensayo sobre los textos Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research y Meeting the Challenge of Adolescent Literacy: Research We Have, Research We Need se presenta como un argumento a favor del dialogo y la comprension de las diferencias en el campo de la alfabetizacion de adolescentes. Examinamos el contenido de ambos textos manteniendo presente tres temas importantes: el patrocinio, la identidad y la mediacion. Al final ofrecemos posibilidades para considerar este campo de investigacion como area de conversacion.

This study describes how and what 2 classes of middle-track 10th-graders wrote and learned when their teacher employed reader-based and teacher-centered instructional tasks for discussing and writing about a short story. The students wrote an analytic essay in response to the story and completed 3 posttests of story understanding. Retrospective interviews of 4 case-study students were analyzed to examine the students' thinking and reasoning, and to explore their perceptions of the ground rules and teacher expectations as they wrote analytically about the story. The reader-based tasks enabled the students in developing both textual and experiential knowledge about and a thoughtful stance toward the short story. These patterns suggest why the reader-based tasks permitted students to attain significantly higher posttest scores than did the teacher-centered tasks. Reader-based tasks to reading and writing may enable teachers to rethink literature instruction in classrooms with middle-track students.

Although studies of writing and literary understanding have demonstrated the value of analytic essay writing for enhancing story understanding, these studies have focused on student's initial interpretations without considering the effects of a teacher's support and direction. The purpose of this study was to explore how 9th- (n = 6) and 11th- (n = 6) grade students reformulated and extended their initial written analyses of two short stories through revisions fostered by two different kinds of between-draft written comments. After revising initial drafts in two response modes (directive and dialogue), the students wrote paragraph-length responses to posttest questions of story understanding. Results indicated significant (p < .05) main effects for response condition and grade level, with the dialogue condition enhancing story understanding more than the directive condition, and the 11th graders attaining higher posttest scores than the 9th graders. Data from composing-aloud protocols revealed that the dialogue condition supported the students' reformulation of their own interpretations constructed in the initial drafts, while the directive condition seemed to shift the students away from their own initial interpretations of the stories.

This study examined how personal versus formal writing tasks affect what students take from literary text. The writing samples produced by sixty-five 10th-grade students in response to two short stories were analyzed for quality of response, audience, function, syntactic complexity, fluency, and types of response statements. Findings indicated that the reader-based or personal writing tasks enabled the students to produce qualitatively more effective responses that tended to be more fluent and constructed with a wider range of response statements. A shift in audience from teacher-as-examiner to teacher-student dialogue in the personal writing indicated a tentativeness that permitted the students to invite their reader into their explorations of the short stories. Although a large portion of the writing students do in school is about literature (Applebee, 1978), we know little about what these writing experiences contribute to literary understanding. From recent studies of instruction, however, we do know that school reading and writing tasks tend to be limited and limiting largely because of an academic tradition that tends to stress knowing "the facts" rather than exploring personal meaning (Langer, 1984). Applebee's (1981, 1984) studies of secondary school writing indicate that typically teachers assign writing to assess rather than to encourage various responses to text, and that, for the most part, when writing is assigned students must work within preset forms that may short-circuit rather than extend learning. From another perspective, large scale studies of reading and responding to

The theoretical and empirical work of James Britton has been influential in promoting a view of writing as a means of learning and reflecting about subject matter. In detailing the heuristic potential of writing and the wide range of possible uses of writing, Britton’s work has played a significant role in countering the traditional view of writing instruction emphasizing mechanical correctness and the teaching of a rigid set of discourse forms. In particular, Britton’s theory of written discourse function has been used widely in research on writing and has made an important contribution to writing theory and pedagogy. Employed as a key variable in a host of empirical studies on writing, the function system has also been examined and critiqued in a number of theoretical studies. Yet the body of research in which the function system appears has never been analyzed systematically to determine what the theory has contributed to our understanding of how writing is learned and taught. In this review, we examine research employing or critiquing Britton’s theory. Studies are divided into four categories, centering on (a) the nature of school writing; (b) writing processes and written text structures; (c) connections between writing and learning; and (d) critiques of the function system. We also discuss ways in which the function theory could be improved and extended, and examine the theory’s relevance in light of critical issues in American education.

Recent research suggests that if we overlook topic knowledge we may ignore an important source of students' writing problems. Given that writers' topic knowledge affects how and what they compose, this article presents a systematic strategy for examining topic-related knowledge prior to writing. Included in the discussion is a theory-based rationale for the measure, a formalized method for analyzing topic knowledge, and a guide for using the instrument.

While writing researchers and theorists have claimed that composing fosters learning, we need a more rigorous conceptualization of the effects of various writing tasks on learning. This study attempted to refine and extend present knowledge of the interrelationship of writing and learning by examining the effects of various writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) on learning using recall of specific text elements and recall of the theme or gist of expository writing. The results indicate that the relationship of writing and learning is indeed complex, and that factors such as students' topic-knowledge prior to writing, the content structure of the passage, and the nature of the task all assert some influence on what students learn from expository text.