Navarra G. (1998). Itineraries through Logics for potentiating linguistic and argumentative skills
Navarra G. (1998). Itineraries through Logics for potentiating linguistic and argumentative skills. In Steinbring H, Bartolini Bussi M., Sierpinska A. (Eds.). WG7 “Language and Communications in the Classroom”. ICME 7. Reston, Virginia. National Council of teachers of mathematics. 17-23. 303-316.
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One of the main problems which has to be faced daily by teachers is the difficulty the students find in oral and written expression, and it is well known that linguistic competence is an essential condition for learning quite apart from the disciplinary context, even the more technical ones, which apparently require almost exclusively
instrumental skills.
A complex aspect of linguistic competence lies in the ability of organizing one’s opinion in an exhaustive and communicable way; in other words, in the ability of explaining the stream of a reasoning which starting from one or more premises comes to a conclusion2.
In order to face these items, we have been leading since ’86 (constantly attending to the lessons together3) in collaboration with the teacher of Arts in the same course Laura Buzzatti, aimed at potentiating the linguistic skills in students aged 11 to 14. It is a teaching activity within Logic, seen particularly as a transversal area – in comparison with linguistic and scientific-mathematical areas – and as a reflection on language.
After a short overview on the main objectives of our work, we shall analyse three examples: To argue and to explain (11 years), Not banal reflection activities (12-13) and Deductions of a shrewd inspector (13-14) through which we shall illustrate the strategies followed and comment some results through the analysis of yhe students’ answers.
