Development of an Analytical Framework for Dialogic Argumentation in the Context of Socioscientific Issues: Based on Discourse Clusters and Schemes

Abstract

Argumentation is a social and collaborative dialogic process. A large number of researchers have focused on analyzing the structure of students' argumentation occurring in the scientific inquiry context, using the Toulmin's model of argument. Since SSI dialogic argumentation often presents distinctive features (e.g. interdisciplinary, controversial, value-laden, etc.), Toulmin's model would not fit into the context. Therefore, we attempted to develop an analytical framework for SSI dialogic argumentation by addressing the concepts of 'discourse clusters' and 'discourse schemes.' Discourse clusters indicated a series of utterances created for a similar dialogical purpose in the SSI contexts. Discourse schemes denoted meaningful discourse units that well represented the features of SSI reasoning. In this study, we presented six types of discourse clusters and 19 discourse schemes. We applied the framework to the data of students' group discourse on SSIs (e.g. euthanasia, nuclear energy, etc.) in order to verify its validity and applicability. The results indicate that the framework well explained the overall flow, dynamics, and features of students' discourse on SSI.