Teaching linguistic argumentation through a writing-intensive approach

We present the results of a study on whether writing-intensive learning techniques can assist beginner students in learning linguistic argumentation. The analysis is based on student submissions (eighty submissions from twenty students, 22,328 words) from a typical Introduction to Linguistics course, which were analyzed with the Coh-Metrix tool (McNamara et al. 2014), a suite of tests that measures cohesion of the linguistic formulation of the text and coherence of the mental representation. The essays show improvement in descriptive measures (lexical diversity, use of content words) and greater simplicity in terms of readability, suggesting a growth in the sophistication of the students' argumentation and disciplinary knowledge.