ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
This article is part of the Research TopicInteracting factors in the development of discourse practices from childhood to adulthoodView all 7 articles
Development of rhetorical competence in Hebrew-speaking children's argumentative writing: discourse stance across grades 2-5
Provisionally accepted
Anat Stavans1,2*
Sara Zadunaisky Ehrlich1,3- 1Beit Berl, Kfar Saba, Israel
- 2Pannon Egyetem, Veszprém, Hungary
- 3University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
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This study investigates the development of rhetorical competence in Hebrew-speaking elementary students' argumentative writing through their use of discourse stance (DS). DS was analyzed across three dimensions each containing three characterizing categories (i.e., for (orientation dimension the categories: writer, text, audience; for attitude dimension: epistemic, deontic, emotional, and for generality dimension: personal, impersonal and generic). Participants (N = 293) in 2nd grade (age range 7 to 8 years), 3rd grade (ages 8-9), 4th grade (ages 9-10) and 5th grade (ages 10-11) wrote an argumentative essay on a familiar topic. Texts were segmented at the clause level and coded for DS categories; analyses addressed grade differences in dimension use (research question 1), developmental trajectories of categories (research question 2), and within-grade co-occurrence patterns (research question 3). Results show uneven pathways. Orientation and generality increased with grade, whereas attitude was relatively stable. Category-level patterns shifted from reliance on writer orientation, emotional stance, and personal generality in younger students to text orientation, epistemic stance, and generic generality in older students. Association analyses revealed that stance resources clustered into coherent profiles that reorganized developmentally: Grade 2 texts centered on a writer-personal-emotional bundle, whereas Grade 5 texts consolidated a text-generic-epistemic profile, with Grades 3-4 as a transitional phase. Across grades, audience orientation was rare. These findings provide one of the first systematic accounts of DS development in Hebrew children's writing and extend cross-linguistic evidence on early academic literacy. They indicate that rhetorical competence develops not only via increased use of individual stance resources but also through their reorganization into coherent stance profiles, underscoring the value of instruction that fosters generic formulations, epistemic reasoning, and audience awareness.
Keywords: Discourse stance, Argumentative writing, Rhetorical competence, development, Hebrew, elementary school
Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Stavans and Zadunaisky Ehrlich. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anat Stavans, stavansa@beitberl.ac.il
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