The empirical Studies of argumentative Competences and Styles of secondary School Students

Although argumentative competencies are a high priority in educational standards, there is still a relatively small number of empirical studies on the development of the students' argumentative abilities. This circumstance is caused less by a lack of theoretical models of argumentation than by a series of theoretical problems due to the fact that everyday argumentation is often linguistically vague and structurally incomplete, which makes a disjunctive empirical categorisation difficult. The article presents an model of analysis which partly solves these problems, partly avoids them theoretically and thus forms the basis for a reliable data collection. The functional capacity and didactic validity of the model is then demonstrated using a corpus of argumentative conversational turns from pupils in the 8th and 10th grades which contain a range of age differences as well as different argumentative styles.