Teaching the language of reasonable persuasion Sue Argent Presentation Outline: Meaning of ‘reasonable persuasion’ / an answer to the generic – specific question / a pedagogical framework for the language of reasonable persuasion /a worked example. Further examples of classroom tasks. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Critical readers need to deploy Reasonable scepticism Being open minded and willing to be convinced, but only if authors can adequately back their claims (Wallace & Wray, 2011). I have appropriated the term ‘reasonable persuasion’ as an attribute of critical writers from the idea of ‘reasonable scepticism’ – an attribute of critical readers. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Critical writers need to deploy Reasonable persuasion Helping readers towards a preferred interpretation of the information (Hyland & Tse 2005: 157)‏ This view of stance seems to me to be ‘reasonable persuasion’. What’s reasonable scepticism is highly dependent on context, including discipline, sub-discipline, genre, roles and relative status of reader and writer. Similarly, reasonable persuasion is highly context dependent. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Generic or specific persuasion? Generic in two ways: we need to offer students as wide a choice of language as possible and we need a conceptual framework within which they can identify it for ease of retrieval and maximum transferability. Specific in that disciplines and sub-disciplines have their own preferred selection of language features and their own contexts of use for students to discover. In teaching critical writing, or reasonable persuasion, the language is both generic and specific. We don’t know the practices of different disciplines; Ss must learn how to research the specific aspects for themselves. To do that, they need a conceptual framework. However, there’s a mass of confusing terminology. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Reasonable persuasion involves stance voice engagement criticality hedging qualification certainty persuasion evaluation metadiscourse epistemic marking Published research has given us a broad array of terms. There are various models and frameworks to make sense of these ideas -- useful in generating research into all forms of academic writing – particularly but not exclusively corpus based. But they suffer from complexity, are not student friendly. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Models Often have confusing terminology Don’t directly lead to the language as it appears in text Have difficulty encompassing the full range of possible language Are associated with plenty of research but little classroom penetration? No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

A conceptual framework for nuancing stance BALEAP PIM 15 Nov 2008 A conceptual framework for nuancing stance 1. Selecting, stating and relating information 2. Committing to information a) endorsement / rejection b) hedging / caution c) aligning with or distancing from other voices 3. Evaluating information for the reader a) contributions from other voices: evaluative attribution b) use of emphasisers, highlighters etc c) choice of marked lexis This term ‘nuance’ is important: to persuade, the writer has to nuance the stance. The framework identifies 3 layers of nuancing. The writer’s viewpoint starts to be shown in what is selected and stated. But it’s nuanced by the way s/he chooses to relate the bits of information together functionally to show his/her thinking; commit to the information as a writer; 3. evaluate the information persuasively for the reader. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018 (c) Sue Argent

Nuancing stance: selecting and stating information One of the benefits of open-source software is that it is free. Open-source software has a track record of being stable at launch. More developers work on it. It is more secure. Worked example: Extract from an on-line discussion thread. The writer has selected and stated 4 facts. The ‘reasonable persuasion’ is stripped out. Can you guess what was originally in this text to show the reader any relationships between these 4 stated facts? No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Nuancing stance: relating information One of the benefits of open-source software is that it is free. Also, open-source software has a track record of being stable at launch because more developers work on it. For this reason, it is also more secure. Shown in green. Writer has signalled additional benefits, and 2 cause-effect relations. How do you think he hedged his stance to make it more defensible? No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Nuancing stance: committing to information One of the benefits of open-source software is that, for the most part, it is free. Also, open- source software has a track record of being stable at launch, because more developers work on it. For this reason, it may also be more secure. Shown in amber, writer has added caution to the claims re cost and security. Where might he make his claims more persuasive? No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Nuancing stance: persuading the reader One of the largest benefits of open-source software is that, for the most part, it is free. Also, open-source software has a long track record of being incredibly stable, even at launch, because so many more developers work on it. For this reason, it may also be more secure. The benefits of cost, track record and stability have been emphasised with boosters, together with the number of developers. There’s even a surprise aspect (signalled by even). Task A on the Task sheet is similar. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Tasks This task and Tasks A & B on the Workshop Tasks sheet have been adapted from: Argent, S. and Alexander, O. (2013). Access EAP: Frameworks. Reading: Garnet Education which uses HWUSE, the Heriot-Watt University Science and Engineering Corpus Next slides: answers. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Suggested answer: A 2. Despite MT’s (Machine Translation’s) clear inferiority to human translation, computers have established a firm foothold in several roles. Computer software is often used as a tool by professional translators. CAT (Computer Aided Translation) can both reduce the workload of many translation tasks and speed up the process, particularly for highly predictable text such as technical manuals. Nuanced stance is colour coded as in the previous example No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Suggested answer: B Author A: In the study, almost 40% of businesses addressed training and skills requirements, nearly 25% integrated business and technology objectives, and 15% met all their success criteria.   Claim 1: Local businesses are progressing well. Author B: In the study, less than 40% fully addressed training and skills requirements, less than 25% properly integrated business and technology objectives, and only 15% met all their success criteria.  Claim 2: Local businesses are not progressing well. No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018

Suggested answer: C 1... There are studies, she explained, that show that speaking English to your children even if you have an accent and are not fluent does not necessarily benefit the child’s English development, but and can even slow down the development of the other first language 2 After the intervention, the babies in the radio and television group were just only as good as the baseline group who didn’t receive any input. The other tutor-led group could discriminate Chinese sounds in the same way as well as babies growing up in China. Also note: In extract 2, the criterion for evaluation (‘only as good as’ – in terms of what?) would be better placed in the first sentence: ‘... only as good as the baseline group at discrimniating Chinese sounds ...’ No Innocent Bystanders: Stance and Engagement in Academic Discourse. St Andrews 2018