Corpus Analysis on Students’ Counter and Support Arguments in Argumentative Writing

This study analyzes the linguistic features of counter-arguments and support arguments using two computational linguistic tools: Coh-Metrix and Gramulator. The research question investigates whether counter-argument paragraphs and support paragraphs are different in terms of their linguistic features. To conduct this study, a corpus of 78 argumentative papers was collected. The paragraphs in the papers were categorized in terms of their function. The categories included functions of Support, Counter-argument, Expostulation, Counter-argument and Expostulation, Background, and Other. The paragraphs were analyzed for their readability and writing quality through Coh-Metrix. With the exception of the measure of Deep Cohesion, the Coh-Metrix results suggest minimal differences in terms of readability and writing quality between counter-argument and support paragraphs. Following the Coh-Metrix analysis, both counter-argument and support corpora were analyzed through Gramulator for their lexical features.