Browsing by Author "Ahonen, Jonna"

The ability to reason and to write argumentative texts are part of multiliteracies and genre skills, without which it is difficult to get along in the society. Teaching and development of the argumentation and genre skills form a continuum, in which the argumentative writing in primary school is typically practiced in the form of an argumentative text. At the end of the comprehensive school students are expected to have many kind of expertise related to the mentioned skills, so it is reasonable to find out how does the sense of genre appear at the beginning of the mother tongue teaching. Despite this and the concern about the students’ argumentation and writing skills, the research related to argumentative texts in the context of primary school is still narrow. The purpose of this study was to determine what kind of sense of genre the argumentative texts written by fifth graders reflect. I approached the subject from the perspective of the overall structure. I studied the general structure of the texts in respect of the formal and the functional parts and also how the functional parts are realized. The thesis was a qualitative case study. Research material consisted of 44 argumentative texts written by students on fifth grade. The material was analysed using structural analysis. The analysis of the structure within these texts was carried out for the part of formal and functional structure analysing the typography of the texts and the functions of the text parts. The analysis indicated that the fifth graders construct their texts on the general structure known from the traditional school essay, the main claim and the arguments. Heading and 1– 4 text paragraphs were separable as formal parts of the fifth graders’ argumentative texts. Most students constructed their text of one text paragraph in addition to the heading. Based on the analysis the texts consisted of functional parts that were referred to as heading, the start, the main claim, arguments and the end. From fifth graders’ perspective these parts appeared to be essential components of the genre, as they were found in almost every text. It is how these functional parts were carried out varied greatly. Prototypically the heading described the subject, the start contained an opinion, the main claim was found easily, the argument was based on comparison and the text ended with an advice or a request. The texts expressed sense of genre, but the overall structure of the texts was not fully established.