Supporting emergent bilinguals’ argumentation: Evaluating evidence in informational science texts
Much of the research on teaching argumentation has focused on the genre, its features, and ways to support students in orally constructing or writing an argument, but far less is known about what students need to do as readers in preparation for writing an argument. The case study presented here explores how close attention to language features commonly found in informational science texts can support fourth-grade emergent bilinguals in identifying and evaluating evidence. It illustrates how, with functional grammar metalanguage of usuality and likelihood, a teacher can facilitate discussions about words in science texts that indicate authors’ degrees of uncertainty and in turn support students’ evaluations of evidence. Analysis of the instructional discourse also reveals potential pitfalls in this approach, as degrees of uncertainty expressed by an author do not make evidence inherently strong or weak. The strength of evidence must be determined through considering its relationship to the claim.