Plural analyses of a debate among students. Emergence of an thematic-argumentative analysis
What methods of discourse analysis are relevant to investigate oral argumentative dialogical practices? We focus on the study of a debate between students who are in their fourth year in a French secondary school. This corpus is part of a project for citizenship education to nanotechnologies. The confrontation of theoretical fields (Socially Acute Questions didactics, language sciences and didactics of French first language leads us to propose a study of a reasoned debate among students on SAQ related to nanotechnologies. We present the advantages and limitations of a thematic content analysis (Bardin, 1977) and of an argumentative discourse analysis (Plantin, 1996).We propose a new analysis of oral language interactions, called thematic-argumentative analysis. It enables to study topics in a temporal perspective as the debate unfolds and to account for the argumentative orientation of the utterances. It refers to new concepts to analyse argumentative moments.