Online Groups in Educational Settings: An Opportunity for Argumentation

The aim of this paper is to explore how students and teachers used posts in five groups on Facebook and how argumentation emerged as a communicative activity. For understanding such argumentative process, this study is framed in the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), with a methodological perspective that enables the participants to act as co-authors of the intervention design. We draw our data from the posts inside five groups of teacher-students on Facebook, from February/2013 to June/2014, which were analysed qualitatively, considering discursive and linguistic aspects of the posts. Our findings pointed out that in situation in which collaboration occurred among students, there was a transition from authoritative discourse to internally persuasive discourse in the posts with argumentative indicators.