The Development of Argumentative Stance in Hebrew-Speaking Schoolchildren: Linguistic Strategies for Expressing Internal Disagreement

This study examines how Hebrew-speaking children in Grades 2 to 5 construct discourse stance in written argumentation, focusing on the development of internal flexibility within a predominantly stable personal framework. Drawing on a corpus of 659 argumentative texts from 291 Hebrew-speaking children in Grades 2 to 5, the analysis combines the coding of positioning and linguistic strategies with lexical and structural analyses of the counterclaiming subset ( n = 124). The results show that across grades, children reliably adopted and maintained a clear initial standpoint, typically expressed through a personal orientation. Developmental change was manifested primarily in the selective introduction and organization of alternative perspectives rather than in shifts in evaluative direction or impersonality. Once counterclaims were present, three recurring strategies for expressing internal contrast—expressing opposition, modulating opposition, and opening alternatives—were attested across grades. Lexical abstraction, particularly the use of abstract nouns, increased with grade and co-occurred with more elaborated text structure, whereas internal state verbs remained stable. Together, the findings characterize stance development as a gradual shift in epistemic organization rather than a move toward impersonal framing, highlighting how children learned to manage divergence within argumentative discourse.