Percepción docente sobre costumbres metodológicas de argumentación informal en el comentario de texto

Abstract

This study explores Spanish secondary-school language and literature teachers’ perceptions of their habits when teaching the development of informal argumentation in textual commentary. Using a qualitative methodology with an interpretive-phenomenological design to shed light on this aim, the teachers were interviewed about this question. Then, hermeneutic units were created from the reported data using a cyclical process of segmentation, codification, and conceptualization. These were analysed using the Atlas. ti program to establish comprehensive maps of the studied reality. The results of this research show that: teachers choose a variety of texts for preparing argumentative commentaries, favouring literary and journalistic ones with less interest in multimedia sources; negotiating text choice with students is problematic due to the low quality of the resources students provide; there is a tendency towards written commentary with limited oral interaction, despite teachers’ awareness of the learning benefits that speech offers in the composition, revision and evaluation process through students’ flexibility and well-founded cooperation in the learning processes. There is a strong preference for written feedback as this provides an individualised record of errors for further analysis and discursive evaluation follows guidelines and rubrics from handbooks, promoting self-evaluation and student co-evaluation with a variety of instruments. In conclusion, comparing these habits with the competence-based educational approach reveals the academicist survival of the philological canon in text selection and the cliche of commentary as an individual written practice that is more reconstructive than constructive, which hinders the democratic interest in promoting students’ critical thinking, media literacy in the classroom, and oral practices in the process of teaching informal argumentation in text commentary.