Chapter 12. Shifting from a monological to a dialogical perspective on children’s argumentation

When twoto six-year-old children contribute to argumentative discussion, how do they reason? Can Argumentation theory, a discipline that up to now has largely focused on adult expert productions, contribute to a psychological understanding of the child? And, in turn, can a close examination of children's argumentative moves contribute to the study of inference in argumentation? Our interdisciplinary research program ArgImp, at the crossroads of psychology, education and argumentation theory, tries to enrich these two lines of enquiry by conducting empirical studies with young children involved in argumentative activities and by analyzing them with models and methods borrowed from Argumentation theory (in particular, Plantin, 1996; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004; Rigotti and Greco, 2010). Analyses of the efforts to introduce argumentation in learning activities at school reveal the theoretical and practical complexity of such ambition (Rapanta & Macagno, 2016; Schwarz & Baker, 2017). However, little is known about the psychological difficulties met by children in developing such skills, and the existing evidence seems contradictory. This has led us to a theoretical shift from argumentation seen as a "skill" to argumentation seen as a "contribution to a critical discussion". Our results show that a consideration of the dialogical (and not just individual) nature of argumentation and attention to argumentation as a process can help understand young children's reasoning activity and how it is embedded in their larger psychological activity. Adults tend to be centered on specific linguistic or cognitive behaviors expected from kids taking part in argumentative discourse, while our analyses reveal complex symbolic and relational work that children also accomplish in order to produce argumentation. They are active contributors to critical discussions using multiple argumentations and introducing issues. Often the inferences that children make are not the ones that adults expect and the latter then tend to interrupt them. Children help us to shed a developmental light on argumentation: issues and standpoints are not always fixed but are likely to evolve in time; discussion issues are likely to be transformed as they are talked about; and standpoints are not always present before being co-constructed in the on-going dialogue.