story by Claire Miller
Writing skills are a crucial component of an elementary student’s academic journey – from developing their vocabulary and learning grammar rules to writing in complete sentences and constructing full paragraphs.
Students also begin learning argumentative and persuasive writing in elementary school. By the time they reach fourth and fifth grade, students are expected to know how to identify a topic, take a position on that topic, offer evidence and end with a concluding statement. And as they develop their argument writing skills in later grades, they also learn to recognize and respond to counterarguments.
These skills can be difficult for students to master, especially if they’re bilingual and learning how to write in the argument genre across multiple languages and cultural expectations.
“Writing an argument in Mandarin doesn’t only mean writing in Chinese characters, but it also might shift the structure and expectations of what argument writing looks like,” said CEHD Assistant Professor Renata Love Jones.
Love Jones co-authored a study to find out whether a specific intervention program could help improve bilingual students’ language and literacy skills – particularly their argument writing.
For this study, she and her colleagues recruited educators at eight elementary schools to implement the CLAVES intervention, which stands for comprehension, linguistic awareness and vocabulary in English and Spanish. This curriculum project uses a combination of explicit instruction, guided practice work and discussion of texts and language to help children develop their knowledge and skills with expressive and receptive language, including discussion-based and written argumentative skills.
Students select the topics and themes for their writing from their text-based discussions and mentor texts – the writings that teachers use to introduce students to specific genres.
“The approach to writing drew on a sociocultural and functional understanding of how people use language with others in culture to accomplish particular goals and tasks,” Love Jones explained.
The 239 bilingual students who participated in this study were split into a control group that didn’t receive any CLAVES instruction, and a group that participated in the curriculum project during their classroom small group reading time or outside of class with an ESOL or reading specialist.
Love Jones and her colleagues found that CLAVES had a positive impact on two aspects of bilingual students’ argument writing: Making an argument and developing a counterargument. CLAVES gave bilingual students an opportunity for concentrated, small-group interaction that helped them hone their writing and language skills in another language.
The study’s results, which were published in The Elementary School Journal, demonstrate how effective CLAVES can be for bilingual students developing their writing skills.
“Given the central role that argumentation plays in academic discourse and the role writing plays in academic and professional contexts, students must develop a strong foundation in argument writing skills,” they wrote. “Results from this study suggest it might be worthwhile for educators, particularly those of bilingual students, to consider how addressing written argumentation through small-group, multicomponent academic language and literacy intervention might benefit their students.”