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Argument(Also: argumentation, argumenté) Current French definitions of argument for students focus more on what it is not than on what it is: it is not a polemic, not an argument between experts, etc. Nor is it a personal perspective, an “opinion”: “…French academic essays are less subject to an “I think that…” than to a formula like ‘what might one think…,’ as much as we seem to require students to produce responses dominated by sincerity, good will, frankness…” (Delforce cited in Delcambre 1997, p. 24). The most widespread definition is founded on the traditional definition of “argument”: argumentation as the presentation of two opposed theses or points, what N. Cordoray calls a “discursive confrontation.” The “good argument” is: the writer’s ability to manage this confrontation between two theses; the will to convince readers demonstrated by the progression the writer chooses (from a questionable thesis to a defended thesis); the structure organized by two distinct theses; the arguments founded on and grounded in examples; the disqualification of one thesis in light of the other, etc. (Boissinot, 1994, p. 36–37). These large-scale movements are supported by micro-developments: connectors (transition words), formatting, modifiers that indicate the writer’s degree of adherence to a given point, are analyzed in order to study the features of argumentative discourse and are taught as argumentative strategies. C. Garcia-Debanc (1994) links the ability to argue to the development, in young students, of the ability to justify a response. Among the components of younger students’ arguments, she cites opinions, representations of scientific phenomena, and justification. But she is not talking about “justification” in its extrascholastic sense. Justifying can appear to be an act carried out by someone inferior iin position to the person listening to the justification—justifying taken as “justifying oneself,” with the possibility that the justification will be contested. When a student writes (in general or in order to show that he or she knows how to write, or reason, or argue…), this posture seems reasonable. Garcia-Debanc suggests that this justification is not specific to L1 French class: “in most or all of their school subjects, students are asked to justify their answers…” (1994, p. 5). B. Delforce, cited in Delcambre (1997), develops a similar distinction between arguing (putting a thesis out there and supporting it) and deliberating (discovering one’s thesis as one writes), in order to suggest that what is proposed to students in France is in fact a form of deliberation, although the students are supposed to know their conclusion before they begin writing (they write an outline, for example) but to not uncover the conclusion to the reader until the end of an essay’s written conclusion. In addition, this response is generally already dictated by the assignment, which announces a thesis that the student is to support or to refute: the student does not have free reign to choose a perspective, a motivated point of view to “argue.” |