Shaping Skills Of Reasoning In Esp Course At Technical University

Required skills

Our experience and the obtained experimental data demonstrate poor reasoning skills of engineering students. According to our survey and interrogation, only 14 percent of undergraduates are able to produce utterances containing arguments. Students sometimes substitute a very vague commentary for substantial arguments. Very often they are not able to present information, express their opinion, and support the ideas clearly, concisely, and logically so that the listeners can follow the line of reasoning. In other words, our students lack the skills of reasoning and argumentation.

Skills are a part of the syllabus content; therefore, it is significant to develop competencies and skills required. If we compare intellectual skills of our graduates with the skills of other professionals, we can admit that they are almost equal. They are good at their field and comprehend the world on the whole but their skills of communication are not good enough and they should be improved. Besides, we have to shape skills vital for the 21st century professionals such as critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, creativity, information literacy, collaboration, communication skills (Burkhardt et al., 2003).

These skills are also referred to the category of intellectual skills and they cannot be evolved automatically. We have to develop them gradually step by step according to the generally accepted psychological cognitive model: purpose – motivation – object – pattern – operation – result – reflection – correction. Some authors (Ibraim & Justi, 2016; Ivlev, Ivlev, & Ivleva, 2017) limit the list of skills only to the skills of logical thinking, reasoning and objections which are considered to be sufficient enough to take part in the discussion. Such skills constitute an operational base for a person to be involved in a discussion on any issue. The ESP course is an opportunity to master these skills. But the list of skills for engineering students should be extended as the range of issues they have to analyze and discuss is really wide. Actually, Miloradov (1999) has extended this list with the skills of argumentation. We share his ideas and suggest the list of skills to be developed at a technical university through the ESP course acquisition:

• skills to support reasons to own utterance;

• skills to appeal to the opponent’s arguments;

• the ability to summarize and make conclusions;

• skills to respect the opposite point of view;

• skills to bring evidence clearly and concisely

• skills to keep to the issue discussed;

• skills to compare or to contrast own judgment with the opposite point of view;

• the ability to listen to the partner, to hear and to comprehend what is discussed.

Therefore, it is significant to select appropriate texts in the ESP course design. Text selection should be made according to the criteria of critical intention, authenticity, consistency, coherence. Texts should include examples of reasoning and argumentation and IT tools should also be integrated into the ESP course. The ESP educators consider electronic resources containing authentic engineering information to be beneficial for creating a e-learning environment (Sergienko, 2009; Ivanova, 2010).

Text selection

Let’s consider text styles used for teaching argumentation and reasoning.

The publicistic style is intended to affect a person to persuade of the statement validity or provoke the response not only by the utterance argumentation logics but also by its emotional intensity. It is close to the scientific prose due to its factual consequentiality, the utterance intensity and strict separation into logical pieces (paragraphs). The main distinctive feature of publicistic style is the conciseness of narration, which in turn comprises both logical argumentation and emotional impact.

The scientific prose style. The purpose is to prove some hypothesis, create new concepts, disclose the laws of existence, and investigate relations between different phenomena. The language means used in this style, therefore, tend to be impersonal.

The main feature of this style is logical sequence of statements with indication on their relationship. Thus, the distinctive feature of scientific style is what is called “sentence – patterns”. Such patterns can be of three types: postulatory, argumentative and formulative. A hypothesis, scientific proposal or prediction should be based on the well-known facts that have already been systematized and defined. The reference to these facts only precedes the author's ideas which can also be presented in the form of formulas, theory, principle, argument, research results, etc. A sentence pattern containing a definition of scientific statement, i.e. a sentence that summarizes arguments, is usually a final sentence. The characteristic feature of the style is quotations and references that serve as indirect support the idea. The need to quote and reinforce arguments seriously affects the utterance syntactic structure.

To identify and to analyze arguments in the text and to produce utterances containing arguments, students first should be aware of the argument structure. Some theoretical grounds would facilitate discourse appreciation. And the assignments could be designed then in accordance with the argumentation structure and the stages of argumentation evolution. Learning argumentation and arguing still raises theoretical and methodological issues. Argumentation requires specific intellectual and social skills. It, as a necessary skill, facilitates students` intellectual development.

Argument structure

Students should be aware of the argumentative speech structure as a basic component of the verbal communication culture of future engineer. Regarding the NTS-3, the ability to express opinions and to provide at least two arguments supported by information and knowledge, life or reading experience should become essential in shaping communicative skills.

The key approach in teaching an argumentative statement/utterance is the argumentation theory. In the science of logics an argument is often called a premise, i.e. a statement intended to support a thesis. In the theory of argumentation there is a broad notion of arguments. Argumentation provides evidence, explanations, and examples to justify some idea. Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin (2015, p. 3) define an argument as “a connected series of sentences, statements, or propositions (called “premises”) that are intended to give a reason of some kind for a sentence, statement, or proposition (called the “conclusion”)”. The arguments objectivity is determined by the logical rules and ability to use the appropriate arguments for the issue discussed.

Argumentation in problematic discourse was studied by Erduran, Ozdem, and Park (2015), Ibraim and Justi (2016), Ivin (2015), Ivlev and Lepskaya (2017), Muller Mirza and Perret-Clermont (2009), Pedemonte and Balacheff (2016) and others. There are three reasoning techniques viz. logical arguments (employing all kinds of facts – statistics, data obtained through experiments, science-based laws, etc.), illustrative arguments (the exact examples and those taken from literature) and references to authority (in many cases - citation). The key task of an argument is to convince. However, not everything that convinces us is an argument. Warning, advice, expression of opinion or even description are not considered to be arguments. Explanation is not an argument too, because explanation is often an extended story about the issue itself. Thus, teaching argumentation involves three stages: 1) teaching thesis (thesis formulation), 2) teaching convincing arguments, and 3) teaching conclusion. Therefore, exercises are to be of three types.

Teaching argumentation includes the ability to convince the opponents by means of the critical assessment of statements, hypotheses, assumptions, and opinions. Thus, the aim is to teach an evidence-based (argumentative) statement. Muller Mirza and Perret-Clermont (2009) argue the necessity to improve the students’ ability to argue during the entire course of studies, but now it is reasonable to optimize the process of skills development by means of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). Updating the training content by using new educational technologies and introducing information technologies in the training practice significantly optimizes the formation of foreign language communicative competence of technical University students (Ivanova, 2010).

Logically flawless and reliable arguments reveal the essence of the topic. Common errors made in reasoning, as a rule, are tautology (or a circular motion). Usually students fail to justify the validity of certain insights and concepts. The validity criterion or logical fidelity is the main feature of deductive reasoning. An inductive argument cannot be logically correct and is potentially vulnerable. If the students have no idea on the issue and possess no skills of abstract thinking, it is better to use the induction method: to present a typical, specific, well-known phenomenon and make a conclusion based on general patterns. In the deductive method, on the contrary, they pass from the general laws to details and can estimate specific processes, phenomena, and events. The argumentation encourages the students to conceive the issue and invites to a dialogue or discussion.

Argument teaching approach

The technique of teaching argumentation and reasoning includes teaching:

• Thesis statement (the sender expects the addressee to accept the thesis and arguments);

• Arguments presentation.

When we discuss something we have to follow the logics in a coherent statement to make our opponent understand us. It is important to structure the statements logically. We can do it in the following way: first, we have to design a three step teaching model: thesis – arguments – conclusion; second, state the subject of a short message (what do you want to say?); third, determine what you want to achieve (to put new problems, to refute or defend a point of view, to convince the audience, etc.); fourth, to think over the main thesis, to select examples.

The skills of logical thinking can be developed by exercises with strict management (the exercises of the first level are primarily individual by nature). This group of exercises is based on the information taken from a text/video/audio material. Students are given a topical statement (thesis). They need to investigate the information to find the data required and to choose the arguments to support it. Exercises of the second level with partial control imply well-developed mental abilities (individual concepts supported by argumentative judgments) (Gurova & Nikolaeva, 2010).

The ESP multimedia course integrated into some e-learning environment (LMS Moodle 3.0) should be of interdisciplinary character, as the assignments with high integrative capacity require students to use information from various subjects and apply their intellectual skills. The ESP educators should take into account the students specialist area to shape communication skills in general but with the emphasis on the development the ability of reasoning (Margaryan & Alyavdina, 2018), e.g.

Assignment 1. Acquire relevant information from the Internet to support the issue: Why was the external fuel tank orange during the Shuttle program? Make attempts to give your reasons.

Thesis: This technology is considered to be an engineering challenge.

Argument 1 (vehicle cargo capacity is ….) = actual figures

Argument 2 (the cost to deliver one pound of payload into orbit is …) = actual figures

Argument 3 (to increase the vehicle cargo capacity it was decided to ….) = actual figures

Conclusion.

As students very often do not know much in their field of engineering, they have to refer to the English-language Internet sources to find factual information and explain why such an engineering decision was made during the Shuttle program implementation (professional competence) and present a monological reasoned statement. It is very helpful to ask students some leading question. To teach students to ask interesting, manageable questions in order to specify the situation or phenomena is also one of the goals in teaching reasoning. “Choosing an interesting and manageable question may manifest first as an exercise in sense-making and then in either self-persuasion or as part of a dialogue” (Passmore & Svoboda, 2011, p. 8).

Evaluation criteria for reasoning/argumentation skills assessment

The argumentation features to be assessed were suggested by Rybka (2012). We have adapted them for students of a technical university and designed the evaluation form to assess the skills.