A Sociocultural Mediation Approach in Developing International ESL/EFL Students’ Argumentation using Infographics

Abstract

Critical thinking and argumentation are essential skills and graduate attributes for university students (Andrews, 2015; Laurillard, 2012; Perkins, 2013). The lack of evidence-based pedagogy for argumentation teaching, however, has been a key finding of many studies (Hirvela, 2017; Wingate, 2012). The main criticism of present approaches is that they are mechanistic and heavily text- but not thinking-/reasoning-focused. The situation is compounded for international students with English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) because of additional challenges: learning in English as an additional language and dealing with cultural differences in argumentation between their own and the target culture.

The present study draws on a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective of mediated learning to explore how using infographics can mediate the argumentation development of a group of ESL/EFL students undertaking a tertiary preparation course in the Australian context. Wertsch's (1998) mediated action is adopted as the theoretical tool for investigating the student development of argumentation because it places both speech and gesture in the middle of three mediators involved in the argumentation teaching and learning processes.

The thesis takes a case study approach (Merriam, 1988), collecting qualitative data involving observations, field notes, artefacts and interviews. This data was analysed with both deductive and inductive coding methods, guided by reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2012) and the qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2015). The study involved the design and implementation of an infographic-based program within an existing ten-week preparatory academic English course at an English college in Sydney in 2018. The use of infographic-based pedagogy was designed to address issues of language load. Toulmin’s basic model (Data-Warrant-Claim) formed the basis of the teaching because of its focus on raising the meta-language and meta-awareness of argumentation. The main finding is that purposeful scaffolding of both instruction and teaching materials are central to developing the students’ argumentation skill. Consistent application of extended questioning in a dialogical manner was found to be key to creating and placing the opportunities for argumentation learning in the hands of the students. On the other hand, teaching and learning materials were also found to require tailor-made infographics and examples that scaffold learning.

The significance of the study is threefold. Theoretically, it offers a new approach to investigate Toulmin’s model by applying Vygotsky’s (1978) concept grounded on mediated action (Wertsch, 1998), and emphasises the importance of investigating the teaching/learning of the relevant skills from a process-oriented (i.e. argumentation) instead of the traditional product-oriented (i.e. argument) approach. Methodologically, it extends traditional research from instructional-, linguistic- and genre-based practices to a mediation-driven methodology that incorporates a bi-domain analysis of gestural language and speech together for understanding the relevant actions and processes involved in argumentation development. Pedagogically, the present study confirms findings of the potential for integrating infographics with argumentation teaching and learning, with the proviso that embedding explicit instructions of image and graphic reading skills in an infographic-pedagogy are also incorporated. The study highlights the need for existing pre- service English language teacher education to include classroom teaching knowledge and strategies for argumentation teaching.