Secondly, the teachers of the subject feel that they are not qualified or competent enough to teach their students the skills of writing essays. A number of teachers refuse to prepare students for reasoning about social and existential issues; instead, they focus exclusively on literature, language and culture, because they are trained in the literary tradition. Thirdly, the survey of national achievements of Lithuanian schoolchildren demonstrates that the schoolchildren find it especially difficult to give reasons or arguments in written. Excellent argumentation (A level) was presented by 4, 3 per cent schoolchildren of the 8th grade (in the year of 2004) and by 7 per cent schoolchildren of the 10th grade (in the year of 2005). The present article makes a review of essential concepts of reasoning, exposition and argumentation. Argumentation theory and its didactic approaches have also been considered. The vision of the application of the argumentation as a product, a process and a procedure for didactic purposes has been presented.

We have defined argumentative text in terms of text typology. The text type identification criteria have been discussed in the article: some subtypes of argumentation according to the mode of thinking have been analysed...