Résultat de la recherche
Young children's argumentative contributions
Drawing on a rich tradition of dialogue-centered studies of children’s talk in conversation with peers and adults, the authors focus on young children’s contributions to argumentative discussions. The most promising research areas in this field are grouped around three keywords: the dialogue, the implicit content within argumentative inference, and the context of the discussion. For each of these areas, the authors discuss existing research, proposing empirical examples of children’s talk and examining how the analysis of these examples not only advances the understanding of children’s argumentation but also sheds new light on the models relative to adults’ argumentation. The findings of this chapter illustrate that children’s contributions should not be considered as isolated productions. They are better understood if placed within the dialogic setting in which they are produced, taking into account adults’ roles and expectations, children’s interpretations of such settings, and, more in general, the design of the dialogue space. Moreover, the analysis of inference shows that often children’s contributions do not differ from adults’ in terms of the argument schemes used, but in terms of material-contextual premises (endoxa). These findings invite further discourse and argumentation research on adults’ expectations and children’s interpretations of dialogic settings, including educational contexts.
Does a good argument make a good answer? Argumentative reconstruction of children's justifications in a second order false belief task
This paper proposes a novel approach to interpret the results of a classical second-order false belief task (the ice cream man task) administered to children in order to investigate their Theory of Mind. We adopted a dialogical perspective to study the adult-child discussion in this research setting. In particular, we see the adult-child conversation as an argumentative discussion in which children are asked to justify their answers to the questions asked by the researcher. We analysed the specificities of the research setting as an argumentative activity type; we reconstructed and analysed the children's answers on the basis of two models taken from Argumentation theory (the pragma-dialectical model and the Argumentum Model of Topics). Our findings show that some of the children's partially “incorrect” answers depend on the pragmatics of the conversation, the relation between explicit and implicit content, and a misunderstanding of the discussion issue. Other “incorrect” answers are actually based on correct inferences but they do not meet the researchers' expectations, because the children do not share the same material premises as the researchers. These findings invite further research on children's reasoning and on the characteristics of argumentation within a research task.
Designing dialogue: argumentation as conflict management in social interaction
The escalation of disagreement into overt conflict in social interaction can be avoided, if disagreement is managed through argumentative dialogue. This paper explores the characteristics of argumentative dialogue and presents the role of third parties who design spaces for others' dialogue. After discussing the prototypical example of dispute mediators, this contribution considers other informal third parties who have a similar role. This opens up a new perspective on informal third parties who work as designers of dialogue and build spaces to manage disagreement in social interaction.
Climbing on Piaget’s soulders to look beyond with a cultural-historical perspective : Argumentation as a situated activity in young children. Insight form the empirical study of their inferences
Shifting from a monological to a dialogical perspective on children’s argumentation. Lessons learned
When two- to six-year-old children contribute to argumentative discussion, how do they reason? Can Argumentation theory, a discipline that up to now has largely focused on adult expert productions, contribute to a psychological understanding of the child? And, in turn, can a close examination of children's argumentative moves contribute to the study of inference in argumentation? Our interdisciplinary research program ArgImp, at the crossroads of psychology, education and argumentation theory, tries to enrich these two lines of enquiry by conducting empirical studies with young children involved in argumentative activities and by analyzing them with models and methods borrowed from Argumentation theory (in particular, Plantin, 1996; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004; Rigotti and Greco, 2010).
Analyses of the efforts to introduce argumentation in learning activities at school reveal the theoretical and practical complexity of such ambition (Rapanta & Macagno, 2016; Schwarz & Baker, 2017). However, little is known about the psychological difficulties met by children in developing such skills, and the existing evidence seems contradictory. This has led us to a theoretical shift from argumentation seen as a "skill" to argumentation seen as a "contribution to a critical discussion". Our results show that a consideration of the dialogical (and not just individual) nature of argumentation and attention to argumentation as a process can help understand young children's reasoning activity and how it is embedded in their larger psychological activity. Adults tend to be centered on specific linguistic or cognitive behaviors expected from kids taking part in argumentative discourse, while our analyses reveal complex symbolic and relational work that children also accomplish in order to produce argumentation. They are active contributors to critical discussions using multiple argumentations and introducing issues. Often the inferences that children make are not the ones that adults expect and the latter then tend to interrupt them.
Children help us to shed a developmental light on argumentation: issues and standpoints are not always fixed but are likely to evolve in time; discussion issues are likely to be transformed as they are talked about; and standpoints are not always present before being co-constructed in the on-going dialogue.
The significance of the adversative connectives aber, mais, ma (‘but’) as indicators in young children’s argumentation
The significance of the adversative connectives aber, mais, ma (‘but’) as indicators in young children’s argumentation
Adversative connectives have been analyzed as articulating explicit and implicit facets of argumentative moves and have been thus recognized as potential argumentative indicators. Here we examine adversative connectives Ger. aber, Fr. mais, It. ma (‘but’) in young children’s speech in the context of the ArgImp project, a research endeavor seeking to understand in which situations children aged between two and six years engage in argumentation and how their contributions are structured. Two multilingual corpora have been collected for the project: (1) everyday family conversations, (2) semi-structured play activities and problem solving in a kindergarten setting. Through the detailed analysis of a small collection of examples, we consider the indicative potential of adversative connectives for identifying argumentative episodes in interactions involving young children and for the reconstruction of the inferential configurations of children’s contributions to these argumentative discussions. The results show that fully fledged argumentative interpretations of adversatives occur as a possibility in children’s speech, and that adversative connectives can be used profitably to identify less apparent argumentative confrontations and implicit standpoints in children’s speech.
The Analysis of Implicit Premises within Children’s Argumentative Inferences
This paper presents preliminary findings of the project [name omitted for anonymity]. This interdisciplinary project builds on Argumentation theory and developmental sociocultural psychology for the study of children’s argumentation. We reconstruct children’s inferences in adult-child and child-child dialogical interaction in conversation in different settings. We focus in particular on implicit premises using the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) for the reconstruction of the inferential configuration of arguments. Our findings reveal that sources of misunderstandings are more often than not due to misalignments of implicit premises between adults and children; these misalignments concern material premises rather than the inferential-procedural level.