What is it about?
Argumentation is a multifaceted skill where students are often required to argue for and against a given topic. Intrinsically, it is part of social practices oriented in organized or disorganized corpus of knowledge, mostly prevalent in political, media, and legal discourses which often reflect social realities. It is also a knowledge domain used for negotiation of meaning from developmental levels to advanced communication skills enveloping a plethora of local and global discourses particularly of social, political, economic and historical significance. These discursively constructed knowledge structures have seeped into student writing, too. Framing and developing an argument compellingly in academic writing, students need to focus on several aspects of textual construction: target text topic, critical thinking, critical judgment, primary academic voice, empirical evidence linguistic resources, generic features, and intellectual intensity.
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Why is it important?
Argumentative essay writing process involves complex and multifaceted skills where students are required to argue for and against a given topic, often taking up multiple subject positions which entail a strong element of conceptualization. While constructing their argumentative essays, the participant students of this study were preoccupied with their inherited identities and disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity mediated by several discourses associated with ethnicity, politics, social injustice, nationalism, and religion with the resultant incongruities in conceptualization.
Perspectives
Conceptual incongruities may be defined as the formation and use of concepts that are not aligned or coherent with the essay topic. When student writers deviate in terms of conceptualization from a particular essay topic for a variety of reasons, incongruities invariably occur, and very seldom do such digressions enable students to effectively participate in the discourse of argumentation in writing. An essay topic with its specific boundaries can be regarded as a micro knowledge domain which students are required to expand in their writing process to create a macro knowledge domain. Obviously, the former should be congruous with the latter. However, at times, students transcend the boundaries of the micro knowledge domain in inappropriate ways that engender conceptual incongruities. Such instances of incoherence are problematized in this article.
Professor Ranamukalage Chandrasoma
University of Technology Sydney
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This page is a summary of: Argumentative essays and conceptual incongruities: students mediated by identity and interdisciplinarity, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, July 2022, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/15427587.2022.2102013.
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