Embedding Literacy and Numeracy in The Argumentative Essay (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)

The argumentative essay looks like pure literacy territory, but some of its most persuasive moves are quietly numerical. Teaching South Australian students to argue well means building both general capabilities deliberately: the literacy to structure and control language, and the numeracy to use evidence, proportion and probability honestly. Working within the Australian Curriculum and preparing students for the SACE (Stage 1 & 2), here is how I weave both through a persuasive-writing unit for Years 7-10 and beyond.

Literacy: from opinion to controlled argument

Literacy in argument is about precision and cohesion, not just correctness. Students need the metalanguage to name what they are doing - contention, reasoning, evidence, rebuttal - and the cohesive devices to connect them. The Writing a Comment and Argumentative Essay resource sequences this from a clear contention outward. I focus explicit teaching on a few high-leverage moves.

• Modality: choosing "must", "should" or "could" to calibrate the strength of a claim.
• Connectives that signal reasoning: "consequently", "however", "in contrast".
• Topic sentences that state the argument, not the topic.
• Concession language for handling counter-arguments fairly.

Numeracy: using evidence with integrity

Persuasive writers reach for numbers, and students often use them loosely. This is where the numeracy capability lives inside an English unit. Teach students to interrogate a statistic before deploying it: what is the base, is a percentage a rise or an absolute figure, and does a "$2 a day" framing hide a "$730 a year" total? A short worked example helps - show how "crime doubled" means little without knowing it went from 3 incidents to 6. Asking students to convert between raw numbers, percentages and rates makes their arguments both stronger and more ethical, which the SACE Board rewards in its emphasis on considered, evidence-based writing.

A task that fuses both capabilities

Set a persuasive piece on a debatable, data-rich issue - say, whether a South Australian council should fund free public transport. Students must state a contention, support it with at least one correctly interpreted statistic, and rebut one counter-argument. Mark the argument for literacy control and the evidence handling for numerical accuracy. This mirrors the kind of integrated task South Australian students will meet across the SACE and makes both capabilities assessable in one piece.

Sentence-level practice that builds both

Run quick daily drills that pair language and number sense.

1. Rewrite a vague claim ("lots of people agree") with a specific, sourced figure.
2. Turn a percentage into a plain-English comparison a reader can picture.
3. Soften an overstated claim by adjusting modality.
4. Add one connective to make two sentences show cause and effect.

These take five minutes and compound over a term. Because rhetorical technique is central to persuasion, studying how skilled speakers structure appeals in Analysing Political Speeches - Rhetoric and Stylistic Devices gives students models of literacy and numeracy working together in authentic argument.

Transfer across the curriculum

The capabilities you build here travel. The evaluative, evidence-weighing writing students practise in argument is the same thinking they bring to interpreting a Shakespearean character's motives in Shakespeare - Analysing a Drama (Macbeth), where they must argue an interpretation from textual evidence. Framing literacy and numeracy as tools of honest persuasion, rather than boxes to tick, is what makes them stick for South Australian students.

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