From the Teacher’s Point of View
The students’ debates were also very poor in quality of expression and in terms of their coverage of the essential points; she did not consider their debates to be a suitable starting point for analysis in the form of diagrams and as a basis on which to deepen their understanding, as initially planned.
And yet low frequencies of arguments do not necessarily mean that the arguments themselves that were in fact expressed were never relevant. In other chat-groups’ interactions, there did appear to be argumentative potential in the students’ messages, albeit in a slang and SMS abbreviated form, for example:
31 <Yorick> (. . .) they’ve done tests in maize fields 32 <Yorick> in the phillipines without authorisation 33 <tmoy> and? 34 <tmoy> wotta th results? 35 <Yorick> n’if ts not dangerous why did they do it
completely illegally 36 <tmoy> maybe they did it illegally but that dsnt
mean thts bad
Such an extract reveals the students’ competences in argumentation and reasoning that could be ‘shaped’ to more elaborate forms.
