Roles of Engagement: Examining the Use of Role-playing Controversy in the Teaching and Learning of Argument Writing among 9th Grade Students

Pre-writing treatments were examined in assisting a sample of 80 students drawn from an Integrated Freshman Literacy program at the 9th-grade level. Students were tasked with the opportunity to respond through argument to various prompts featuring epidemiological scenarios, informative texts, and literary texts in preparing argument writing. Should there be a quarantine with the outbreak of H1N1? The students would decide. Did Ernest Hemingway portray a diseased child with empathy and insight? The students would decide that as well. In defining these tasks, two treatments were formulated and examined: a Standard group in which the students explored improving their writing through highly functional small groups tasked with formulating response efficiently; and a Role-Playing Controversy condition that guided students to do the same activities as the Standard group but to add an additional 15-minute discussion in which students responded in role to the inherent controversies in the text. A quasi-experimental, mixed-methods approach was used to investigate the degree to which role-playing exercises conferred an advantage on the subsequent argument writings of 9th graders; qualitative analyses of the student interactions in role playing and control groups was also conducted in order to describe the pre-writing process existing in both conditions. Results: both the control and role-playing conditions had a significant, positive effect on student argument writing. The role-playing condition groups revealed more interactions, questions, and reasoning comments--all signs of healthy small groups.