Abstract:
Informal fallacies of argumentation as pitfalls of reasoning appear frequently in
students' written texts, specially EFL / ESL Learners' argumentative essay writings.
The present study examines whether gender could be considered as a determining
factor influencing Iranian advanced EFL learners' argumentative writings with
regard to informal fallacies of argumentation. The corpus comprised of
argumentative essays written by 120 Iranian male and female English language
learners. The participants’ age and discipline were also included as independent
variables. Nine major categories of informal fallacies were examined in learners’
texts and the observed frequencies were analyzed using MANOVA. The results of
the Multivariate Tests for all independent variables and /or their interactions
indicated no significant differences for the overall informal fallacies. However,
three separate instances of differences were observed. Finally, the findings of the
present are discussed in relation to the previous literature and some implications of
the study are suggested
Machine summary:
"The rationale behind selecting advanced students was that this study focused on the EFL learners' reasoning and strategies of presentation of their arguments in argumentative essay writings in order to find possible distinctive pattern of the frequency and type of informal fallacies in their arguments; hence, no manipulation effect of linguistic knowledge variable was considered.
In order to probe the first null hypothesis predicting no statistically significant differences between Iranian advanced female and male EFL learners in terms of type and frequency of informal fallacies in argumentative writings, a 3- way MANOVA was applied on the observed informal fallacies in the nine categories for both genders, the results of which are depicted in Table 1 below.
The second null hypothesis predicts no statistically significant differences between the age groups of Iranian advanced EFL learners in terms of type and frequency of informal fallacies in their argumentative writings.
The third null hypothesis of the study states: There are no statistically significant differences between the disciplines of Iranian advanced EFL learners and type and frequency of informal fallacies in their argumentative writings.
e. gender, age, and discipline) do not have any significant effect on the use of informal fallacies of argumentation in written discourse of Iranian advanced EFL learners, for the three instances that made a difference were actually quite few compared to the total number of comparisons made."