Scaffolding the writing development of the Argument genre in history: The case of two novice writers

Abstract

We document the writing development of the Argument genre among two multilingual novice writers of academic English after they participated in a literacy intervention in a university-level history class at an English-medium university in the Middle East. We designed three writing workshops based on our previous research to target specific linguistic features of the Argument genre that were challenging for students. We draw on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which provides systematic tools for examining academic writing development, to analyze two students' essays across a semester. Our analysis shows how students who enter university with limited academic writing experiences can benefit from explicit instruction and how writing develops differently, even among students with similar skill sets. These findings support the importance of explicit disciplinary instruction (De La Paz, 2005; Monte-Sano, 2010) with an explicit focus on language (Coffin, 2006b) and contribute to the limited research on language-based writing interventions to improve student writing, particularly at the university level. Detailed qualitative analysis of these students' writing sheds light on the intricacies of writing development, which can help teachers anticipate and mitigate potential challenges.