Richard Anderson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

American children usually find a free-flowing, open format approach to classroom discussion called Collaborative Reasoning to be intellectually stimulating and personally engaging. In this talk, I will present initial evidence about the response of the children from two sites in China and one site in Korea to Collaborative Reasoning discussions. The expected discourse of these discussions is a radical departure from the prevailing patterns of discourse in Asian homes and schools. Thus, according to some theorists, the performance of the children should have been awkward, at best. Based on analysis of discussion transcripts and individually-written reflective essays, I will suggest answers to the following questions: Could Chinese and Korean children manage their own discussions with little or no help from the teacher? Were the children attentive and engaged? Did the children display rhetorical moves, or ‘argument stratagems’, similar those observed among American children? Did skills of argument children acquired during oral discussion transfer to written argument?