| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語研究所 === 100 === This study explored the implementation of an instructional approach to teach argumentative writing to English language learners, termed the ARE model. The acronym ARE stands for assertion, reasoning, and evidence, which correspond to the elements of claim, warrant, and data, respectively, in Toulmin’s (2003) influential argumentation model. More specifically, this study aimed to discover (1) the students’ performance in argumentative writing after explicit instruction in the ARE model, and (2) the students’ perceptions of the explicit instruction in the ARE model. The participants in this study were two classes of second-year English-majors (n=76) at a university in southern Taiwan, aged between 19 and 20 and English proficiency levels ranging from low-intermediate to high-intermediate. In the 18-week curriculum, the students were given a series of scaffolded, explicit instructions in the ARE model to teach them how to make effective arguments. The students’ argumentative writing passages and course evaluations were collected at the end of the course.
The results of a content analysis of the students’ writing indicated that more than half (46 out of 76) failed to produce reasonable and well-rounded arguments. Furthermore, the researcher discovered that four common error patterns existed in the students’ work: (1) assertions were unsupported by reasoning, (2) reasoning was unsupported by evidence, (3) reasoning was absent, and (4) the coherence of the ARE model components was weak. This study interpreted that the students’ weak argumentative writing performance may have been mainly caused by a lack of logical reasoning skills. Despite the students’ weak argumentative writing performance, the results of the course evaluation showed the students’ high satisfaction with and positive perceptions of the ARE instruction. This interesting discrepancy between the students’ positive perceptions of the instruction in the ARE model and their weak performance suggests that they may only have developed metacognitive knowledge about how to apply the ARE elements to construct a convincing argument, but were not capable of doing this in practice. This thesis thus argues in favor of explicit instruction in the ARE model for Taiwanese English learners, with a focus on reasoning skills.
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