初年次演習における論証型文章作成の取り組み

（レポートに意見を書くことの意識づけ）

抄録

Although expressing personal opinions plays an important part in argumentative essay writing, students often express few opinions in their essays. We found two main reasons for that. One reason is that quite a few students do not recognize the importance of expressing their own opinions in essays, and the other is that they do not have a strong interest in academic and profound topics given by teachers. As a result, they have a tendency not to think for themselves and to thoughtlessly copy and paste Internet pages. In order to enhance students' consciousness of expressing their own opinions, we gave them some everyday and fascinating topics to make them try to think for themselves and have their own opinions. This paper describes the details of our step-by-step approach to argumentative essay writing, which focuses on expressing personal opinions, as well as the results of students' self-evaluation of what they acquired through the approach. The results suggest that this approach is effective in helping students express their own opinions in short essays, while it needs to be put to practical use, such as in the writing of a term paper.