In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students' formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two…

This article investigates children's evaluation/selection of ideas in writing-related tasks. The critical dimension being considered was to what extent the communicative goal that defines argumentation establishes basic criteria with which children decide whether to include counterargument in a text. Data analysis focused on participants'…