Degrees of Reasoning: Student Uptake of a Language-Focused Approach to Scaffolding Patterns of Logical Reasoning in the Case Analysis Genre

• Published in: TESOL quarterly Vol. 55; no. 4; pp. 1278 - 1310
• Main Authors: Mitchell, Thomas D, Pessoa, Silvia, Gómez-Laich, María Pía, Maune, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Applied Linguistics; Case Method (Teaching Technique); Case Studies; College Students; Heuristics; Paragraph Composition; Semantics; Writing (Composition); Writing Evaluation; Writing Instruction
• ISSN: 0039-8322
• DOI: 10.1002/tesq.3085

This study reports on student writing outcomes from a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between applied linguists (the authors) and an organizational behavior (OB) professor. We used an ethnographic language-focused approach to make explicit the linguistic features of the case analysis genre at an American university in the Middle East. We analyzed 33 student case analyses to examine how effectively students applied two heuristics from our scaffolding materials: the "semantic wave" heuristic for writing analytical paragraphs that move from abstract to concrete and back to abstract knowledge; and the "I know," "I see," "I conclude" heuristic for making explicit the logical connections between disciplinary knowledge and case information to produce conclusions. Students integrated the focal linguistic features with varying degrees of effectiveness. Most students met genre expectations by making abstract claims about the case at the beginning and at the end of their analysis paragraphs, integrating OB knowledge with information about the case, thus creating effective waves between disciplinary and case knowledge. However, our analysis reveals differences in the quality of students' logical reasoning between high-, mid-, and low-rated texts. We discuss how these differences can inform linguistically responsive disciplinary writing instruction.