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In this project, we define and experimentally check an educational project aimed at improving argumentation ability. We focused on producing arguments suitable to the addressee's viewpoint [Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958). Traite´de l'argumentation. La nouvelle rhe´torique (The new rhetoric. A treatise on argumentation). Paris: Presses, Universitaires de France]. We adopted an educational approach based on the prediction that the more the teacher systematically encouraged students to self-regulate their attempts to cope with the learning tasks, the more effective the educational project will be. In the main phases of the project, we excluded any speech act that might discourage learners' initiative. The only kind of speech act adopted was that defined by Rogers [(1951). Client-centered therapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin] as the only means of implementing an empathic attitude and, consequently, enhancing the addressee's involvement in any kind of mental activity. We assumed that other kinds of educational approaches (such as modelling and observational learning) would be more effective if they were preceded by instructional contexts characterised by a teacher's communicative behaviour aimed solely at encouraging learners' initiative and/or self-regulation, namely by a completely learner-centred instruction. We summarised the main lines of the project and the experimental results. We analysed some significant aspects of the special kind of teacher-learner interaction implemented in the core phase of the treatment by zooming in on a few examples of that interaction. Case analysis was carried out with the goal of gaining insights into how the communication form might have brought about the experimental results.

Summary Why and how is the Gestalt theorists’ concept of productive thinking particularly suitable for being applied to the educational question of how student motivation can be encouraged, thus providing an important condition for self-regulated, intrinsically motivated learning? An answer to this question has been sought using an approach to the fostering of text comprehension ability, based upon the features specific to productive thinking, originally identified by Wertheimer (1945) and Duncker (1935). Firstly, these specific features are dealt with and their educational implications compared with those deriving from the definitions of problem-solving used most frequently in educational research. Secondly, an analysis is made of the process by which the features specific to productive thinking are turned into the conditions for a kind of text analysis suitable for designing an instructional project aimed at enhancing text comprehension ability and, at the same time, encouraging intrinsic motivation and self-regulation on the part of the learner. Thirdly, an educational project centred on the thinking-aloud poor reader is described, where thinking aloud and reflection–response are combined in order to guarantee the maximum level of intrinsic motivation. In the concluding section, the most important features of the project are discussed in relation to reciprocal teaching and scaffolding.

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