Teaching and learning argumentative reading and writing: A review of research

Newell, George, Beach, Richard, Smith, Jamie, & VanDerHeide, Jennifer. (2011). Teaching and learning argumentative reading and writing: A review of research. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(3),273-304.

Everyone who teaches writing, or who teaches about teaching writing, needs to read this thorough review of research on the teaching of argumentative writing. In fact, anyone who teaches writing, or teaches about teaching writing, will probably soon be involved in teaching argumentative writing, if they are not already doing so. Argumentative writing is one of those basic academic and workplace literacy skills that everyone is going to need if they are to be employed in any well-paying profession, or if they are to have an effective voice in our culture. With electronic social media becoming widespread, our argumentative writing is becoming increasingly public, on message boards, blogs, and other ways we can “publish”. We see argumentative structures all the time on the numerous television “news” channels, and argumentation underlies the hundreds of ads we see each week. It’s important that we all learn how to discern what a good argument is, and that we all learn how to write good argumentative prose.

Warning: Newell et al’s review is quite lengthy, and will require a time commitment to read, but the discussion of what we currently know about the teaching of argumentative writing here is extensive, up-to-date, and clear, so it is worth plowing through. I found much information in this review that has already directly informed my own practice as a teacher educator. The teaching of writing, including argumentative/persuasive writing, is a major topic in one of my courses. I used what I read here to revise and redesign a teaching demo that I use to model best practice in the teaching of writing. I pulled several specific research findings reported here into the revised demo, including providing instruction on the goals of argumentative writing, integrating the reading of argumentative texts with the writing of such texts, providing explicit instruction about the components of arguments, using collaborative reasoning discussions to help generate good arguments, using outlines or templates as scaffolds for argumentative writing, using online tools, genre and audience awareness, and the use of visual and multimodal tools in argument. All of these revisions have a research base that I found in one place in Newell et al’s review.

The thesis of the article is that we need to look at research from more than one perspective if we are to get the most complete view of a body of research on a topic like the teaching of argumentative writing. Here, Newell et al blend two perspectives, each with a substantial body of research on the topic. The cognitive perspective primarily employs experimental and quasi-experimental studies to try to find specific types of instructional strategies that are more effective for teaching argumentative writing than the typical “business as usual” strategies. The social perspective primarily employs qualitative and ethnographic methods to more deeply study the contexts of instruction and their influence on how students and teachers construct the process of learning. Both perspectives have things for us to learn, and both perspectives have limitations. The authors do a good job of showing us how the two perspectives can be blended, and what they give us here has been immediately helpful and informative for my own everyday practice. That is what good educational research ought to accomplish for readers. This was a challenging article, but the payoff for me was huge. I trust it will be the same for others who take the time to mine this excellent review.