For example, Bygate (1999) examined the complexity of the language of Hungarian secondary EFL learners on a monologic narrative task and an argumentation task and found that the narrative tasks might stretch the speakers more in terms of complexity of syntactic and lexical processing.
The argumentative task, on the other hand, exhibited a mixed pattern, but the researchers noted that some skilled students were able to write the text without much high-level revision, because they already had a rather well-known schema for the argumentation task.
"For a wide variety of tasks, argumentation allows people to reach better answers," Mercier and Sperber say.
Participants were then assigned to one of three writing tasks, namely argumentation, text designing, and composition.
This study investigated whether students who engage in inquiry dialogue with others improve their performance on various tasks measuring argumentation development.
In contrast, students from Arts, who also tended to be more proficient L2 learners, continued to undertake research-based assignments and demonstrated an awareness of the role played by task type, argumentation and writer authority in their selection and use of sources.
Kowata (2009) found that most of the tasks were argumentations (70.0 %) followed by narrations (10.0 %), expositions (9.33 %), descriptions (5.33 %), and others (5.33 %).
While several existing computer-based learning environments include scaffolds like explanation construction tools, guiding questions, argumentation interfaces, workspaces for structuring tasks, data comparison tools, and tools for observing effects of plans made or models built, several of these scaffolds are part of the environment design and are not adaptive.
Kowata (2009) followed Bain's (1890) classification of texts, which consists of narrations, descriptions, expositions, and argumentations to analyse the writing tasks in the Japanese university entrance examinations.
Hence in the design of this task to support argumentation, we took into account Berland and McNeil's (2010) four vantage point that could alter the complexity of a problem: (1) the complexity of the questions, (b) the size of the data set, (c) the appropriateness of data and (d) the level of scaffolds.
Examination of one case of dyadic interaction shows that beyond the value of given characteristics of individuals or of tasks, the process of argumentation that takes place between the peers explains the subsequent gains of the individuals.
