One of the main goals of the national curriculum is to encourage children’s personal opinion and support them in development of argumentation ability and communication skills. All this is very important for the children as members of the future society. The purpose of this essay is to investigate how primary school teachers estimate the meaning of the pupil’s argumentation as well as which methods and approaches are assumed by the teachers to be most appropriate for children’s argumentation development. The study also considers the questions how the teachers motivate their pupil has to argue in the classroom and how the students by themselves understand the concept of argumentation. The last important part of this investigation is related to the students' own argumentation in different school situations. In order to approach the main aim, one should formulate the following questions: How do the pedagogues reflect on the importance of the student’s argumentation? What methods and procedures of those that the teachers themselves use, do they consider being most beneficial both to motivate students for argumentation and to develop their ability to argue? How the pupils argue in some conversation situations during the lecture, after school recreation centre, and in the pupils’ council and what kind of knowledge do they have of concept of argumentation? To get a deeper understanding of my study I used the qualitative method as a general approach for data collection. The qualitative method is supplemented with a quantitative approach in form of a questionnaire survey. The study is based on interviews with the teachers and students separately, on observations and the questionnaire survey. There are in total five interviews with teachers from three different schools, grade P-3. The collected material is analyzed using Sociocultural Theory, which includes Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development. Both theory and concept are based on the idea that development and learning occurs by means of social interaction and collaboration. The result of this investigation shows that the pedagogues use different approaches for teaching argumentation. Some teachers prefer the implicit way of teaching argumentation, the rest of them believe that the explicit way is more effective. All teachers find argumentation to be an important aspect in the development of the student’s language. Moreover, the ability to argue is associated with democratic rights written in the national curriculum.

This paper is based on the interest of knowing more about cooperative learning and the possible impact it has on primary students' education. Using cooperative learning as a method in school is mostly to involve the students more in their learning process. Through discussions and other structures students have a chance to express themselves and every student can participate in the activity. Our purpose for doing this study is to bring forward the positive aspects of using cooperative learning but also the challenges. Our research questions are: 1. How is cooperative learning used? 2. How do teachers describe cooperative learning and the contribution to students´ language development? Our paper is based on the sociocultural theory which cooperative learning has evolved from. It is important for pupils to use talking skills in school. The methods we used to collect data was through interviews and observations. We interviewed six different active teachers and observed four of them. The material we used to record the interview was a dictaphone. One of us asked the questions and the other made notes by writing down some keywords in case there was something wrong with the recording. The results show us cooperative learning may make the classroom environment a bit noisy. However, this still works since the method has more benefits than challenges. In conclusion, the interviews and the observations reveal the result of how cooperative learning contributes to students' learning by benefiting the students.