Will the Words Follow if I Stick to the Point? The Stance in Defence of Linguistic Clarity in Academic Argumentation

Campbell-Thomson, O. (2018) Will the Words Follow if I Stick to the Point? The Stance in Defence of Linguistic Clarity in Academic Argumentation. EAP Conference 2018, St Andrews, UK, 24 Feb 2018.

Abstract

Once entering English-language universities, students across disciplinary contexts are expected to participate in academic argumentation that constitutes the construction of knowledge. This process of knowledge construction relies on the foundational principles of clarity, reason, evidence and rigour, which are valued in the Western culture of academic inquiry. The field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which mainly caters for non-native speakers of English, emerged in response to the necessity to prepare the incoming students to partake in the process of meaningful academic argumentation. This means that one of the main tasks of the EAP tuition is to build learners’ capacities to construct clear, logical and evidence-based arguments. My engagement with a few generations of students in EAP training indicates that it is the clarity and logic that frequently do not work out. Whereas students tend to acquire rather extensive lexis and are well versed in compiling evidence, meaningful argumentation does not necessarily emerge. To paraphrase the saying of the Roman rhetorician Cato in an epigraph to this paper, ‘the words follow’ but in a rather chaotic fashion. I argue that linguistic clarity is a necessary condition for the development of meaningful academic argumentation. I also argue that the learners’ linguistic capacity for argumentation develops out of their capacity to produce meaningful syntagmatic structures. I employ Husserl’s conception of pure logical grammar to frame my discussion of the sentence structure of the English language as a deductive system, whose content is constituted by a finite number of primitive forms and laws of combination and modification. I aim to demonstrate how these ‘primitive forms and laws’ permit the construction of simple logical chains in argument development. Examples of students’ writing are used to demonstrate the progression of the students’ capacity to develop logical arguments as they develop clarity of linguistic expression.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Campbell-Thomson, Dr Olga
• Authors: Campbell-Thomson, O.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Related URLs

• Organisation