Examining Students’ Performance In Argumentative Genre At Undergraduate Level

Abstract

This study made an attempt to examine students’ writing performance in argumentative genre by engaging them in small group discussion and writing activities based on argumentative short fictions having unresolved issues of murder and suicide cases.
Participants of this study were N= 64 with age between21 and 22, enrolled in semester four at University of Swat. Being a quasi-experimental study, participants of the study were assigned to control group and experimental group non-randomly. To mitigate the issue of observable variables, an informative questionnaire was administered for the selection of participants beforethe pre-test; those found similar on all observable variables were given pre-test. For data collection, this study used survey questionnaire (PSM), pre-test, post-test, group writing activities and small group discussion, and to explore the depth and breadth of the study a semi-structured interview was conducted on the key informants. For measuring the scores made on the pretest and post-test, adapted analytical scoring rubrics were used, which were also employed as instruction guide. To compare the means score of the two groups, independent t-test was used. Thematic analysis was applied for data collected through group discussion and semi-structured interview. The findings of the present study indicate that group discussion broad ened students’ critical thinking and to some extent their argumentative skills and helped them interpret the texts from different dimensions and using sign warrant, causality warrant and otherclues, they were able to resolve the complicated and complex issues of murder and suicide. In addition, this study found that with students arguing and discussing on controversial issues can develop effective argumentative skills from each other without explicit instruction.Results from interviews shows that students felt confident to write and argue on controversial issues. Another common pitfall, this study found was that of basing their claim on assumptions and hunches which was found to be indefensible, because they ignored collecting data which is an integral part of argumentation process.This study suggests that critical and complex issues related to real life situations need to be applied so that students canwork hard cognitively and analytically to develop disposition for argumentation in order toresolve controversial issues.