1. Elizabeth Smith English Language Fellow
What’s in a Debate?! Teaching Debate to Reinforce Academic Language Proficiency Part 2 of a 3 Part Series on Speaking Strategies
Elizabeth Smith
English Language Fellow

2. Agenda: What is a Debate? Debate Language and Structure
Theory of Debate in the Language Classroom
Debate Language and Structure
Small Group Practice
Debrief and Reflection

3. Do Now: Quick write and Turn and Talk
What is your own definition of a “debate”? What does it involve? What is the purpose?
Do you use debate in your class?
Predict some reasons why teaching debate may be beneficial for English Language Learners?

4. Why Debate?
engages students in a variety of cognitive and linguistic ways
provides meaningful listening, speaking and writing practice
 highly effective for developing argumentation skills for persuasive speech and writing
A debate study showed "before the debates only 30.8% of the students were not afraid of expressing their opinions when they were not the same as others'. After the debate this figure rose to 56.7%.“
the debates led the students to become more accustomed to expressing opinions." This suggests that, although debate is quite challenging, non-native speakers can fully develop debating skills Fukuda (2003).