Methodology course paper on the theme

Debate as a pedagogical tool for developing speaking skills in second language education

The ability to speak a second or foreign language properly is an arduous task considering the interwoven factors that come into play when acquiring this abilit. Speaking is a cognitively and socially taxing skill; it entails encoding and expressing thoughts in speech streams that make sense and are contextually appropriate. The need to conceptualize, formulate and articulate thoughts demands a lot of cognitive space in the working memory, a fact that obstructs learners from adequately attending to all aspects of speech Richards and Renandya stated that ‘a large percentage of the world’s language learners study English in order to develop proficiency in speaking’. Learners need to speak English well for better academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. Nonetheless, despite its importance, English speaking practice has been marginalized in many educational contexts. As a result, it is no wonder that many studies have expressed concern about the speaking ability of speaking learners. English speaking in Dutch secondary schools faces similar neglect, many students believe that speaking is insufficiently trained in class and feel frustrated that they are not able to express themselves fully in the target language after many years of instruction. As a result, many secondary school students’ speaking skills suffer from deficiencies, and the effects thereof are more noticeable and detrimental at the university and college stage. ¹⁰
English teachers and students alike have expressed their concern about the current situation. Interviews with Dutch secondary school teachers of English revealed that speaking skills receive the least attention in comparison to other skills in their teaching practice. The teachers ascribed the negligence to the absence of viable teaching tools that would enable their students to effectively practice speaking. In addition, Brown  has maintained that in the speaking context, instructors are confronted with the challenge of finding ways that ensure language development within limited time and budgetary constraints. To overcome these limitations, Brown  proposed employing innovative instructional tools like debates, as their gains ‘can equal if not exceed uptake that occurs in extended immersion environments’.
Debate has been considered a potentially effective pedagogical tool for speaking, which can scaffold and feed the learning process in ways that can lead to language development. Speaking occupies the lion’s share of attention during debate. In addition to planned speech, debates involve a lot of impromptu speaking, as debaters have to think quickly and respond to opponents’ arguments, especially during the ‘clash’ stage. Various studies have reported improvements in students’ speaking competence after participation in debates. Nevertheless, all the studies that have correlated debate participation with oral competency development were based on self-reported data, questionnaires and interviews in addition to instructors’ observations. Experimental evidence that substantiates the existing anecdotal data is notably absent. The main objective of this study is, therefore, to provide some empirical evidence about the effects of an in-class debate intervention on various aspects of speaking competence, employing a pretest–posttest design. Without empirical evidence, the claimed effects of debate on speaking skills remain groundless. This study is premised on the hypothesis that debate pedagogy constitutes an effective avenue for enhancing many areas of English speaking skills. We will discuss the rationale behind this hypothesis in the next section.¹¹
A number of theoretical approaches to English acquisition provide a rationale for assuming a potential effect of debates on speaking skills. For example, the interaction hypothesis of English acquisition pointed out that interactive tasks, such as conversations, set the stage for the negotiation of meaning and that through this channel input and output are connected in a productive way. Likewise, Ellis and Shintani  maintained that interaction can operate ‘as a source of input and opportunities for output which foster the internal processing that results in acquisition’ . Interaction provides learners with multiple opportunities to negotiate meaning and form in ways that lead to English development. Gass and Mackey  concluded that ‘there is a robust connection between interaction and learning’. Debating involves meaningful multi-level interactions. These interactions, which are fuelled and enriched by the competitive atmosphere of debates, assist learners to notice language gaps and accordingly modify and refine their English output. Wade  eulogized the efficacy of the debate-induced interactions, stating that ‘there are certainly trends in education which encourage interactive and dialogic pedagogies, but few are as potent as debate’.¹²
The output hypothesis of Swain and Lapkin provides another theoretical perspective that supports that debates could foster English acquisition. They argued that output provides learners with unique opportunities to process language. Output can assist language learning through prompting learners to notice their language gaps, testing out hypotheses and reflecting consciously on forms. Engagement in bidirectional output highlights gaps in English learners’ interlanguage system and hence facilitates attending to the problematic areas in their language. Benati  argued that involving English learners in structured collaborative output tasks can ‘facilitate the accurate and appropriate use of language forms and structures’. Debate, by its nature, prompts a great deal of oral output as debaters challenge each other’s perspectives and feel the urge to outshine each other’s arguments and how they frame them. In addition to oral output, debate pedagogy may also induce a considerable amount of written output which can boost the oral output. Furthermore, the debate environment does not only raise consciousness about linguistic deficiency, but it also stimulates experimenting with new forms and as well as using language consciously.
Speaking activities are commonly considered as ‘Practice activities rather than English activities’. The act of writing holds a language learning potential, seeing that ‘composition writing elicits attention to form-meaning relations that may prompt learners to refine their linguistic expression – and hence their control over their linguistic knowledge’. We make a similar assumption about speaking in our debate intervention, as it fits this pedagogical mould. We believe that the act of speaking holds a comparable learning potential. Debates create a genuine environment for a meaningful, functional and purposeful use of the target language. In debates, students argue with a communicative and functional purpose in mind: defending their proposition and weakening that of their opponents. Attaining this goal necessitates the use of accurate and sophisticated language. As we shall see, in our debate intervention the act of speaking is not an end in itself, but it functions as a vehicle for synthesizing and analysing arguments and as ‘a task through which language practice can be orchestrated’. Anderson  stated that ‘it is hard to imagine a more harmonious integration of content and language skills than in the teaching of debate’. In short, the debate environment promotes the interface and synergy of two speaking perspectives: learning-to-speak and speaking-to-learn perspectives. ¹³
Debate activities place students at the center of learning, with the teacher assuming the role of a coach, advisor and facilitator. Blumberg  argued that when students are central in the learning process, they are empowered to gain benefits, such as higher rates of content retention, interaction, enjoyment of class activities and deeper understanding of material. Similarly, Emaliana  pointed out that student-centred learning provides opportunities for a ‘conducive atmosphere of learning, dynamic classroom activities, and [offers opportunities] to do autonomous learning’. Debates lend themselves readily to the philosophy of student-centered pedagogy. A well-designed debate pedagogy grants students tools and power to manage the learning process with minimal interventions on the part of the instructor. In debates, students do most of the talking and thinking, which promotes deep learning. In addition, debates promote a healthy competitive pedagogy that serves language learning in many ways. The inherent competitive atmosphere of debate fuels students to generate rich and lengthy negotiations. What is more, research has shown that students hold a positive attitude towards debates and describe them as fun and instructive. This positive task attitude is beneficial to learning as recent empirical research has revealed that there is a positive correlation between task attitude and language acquisition.¹⁴
Taken together, several theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on English acquisition indicate that debate can be a fruitful avenue for oral language learning. Yet, only a limited body of research has investigated how debates can affect oral competence. Littlefield  noted that this dearth of research is particularly noticeable in the secondary school context. It manifests itself in the fact that ‘very few manuscripts dealing with high school debate have been published in academic journals’. The paucity of research that Omelicheva and Avdeyeva, and Littlefield have pointed out concerns the English context. In the English context, the debate research is scarce in the extreme. No empirical study, to the best of our knowledge, has examined the impact of English debate instruction on oral proficiency across all main dimensions of speech production, including speech quantity, fluency, accuracy, complexity and cohesion dimensions in well-controlled empirical designs. Providing empirical-based evidence may stimulate instructors to employ debates in their teaching practice.
Our debate task design was validated in a previous study following the principles and guidelines of educational design research. Students in the intervention group participated in ten debates, one per week. The topics of debates were selected in consultation with the debating students, who received one week of preparation time for each debate. Each debate consisted of three stages: pre-debate, during-debate and post-debate. In the pre-debate stage, the students received a reading assignment relevant to the topic under debate and were asked to find and read one additional article. We instructed the students to summarize the articles and to write a case² in which they had to defend their standpoints. During actual debates, each student presented a speech and a rebuttal and participated in a clash. While listening to each other, the students were instructed to note down mistakes and the words they learned from each other’s contributions. We used two debate formats: debating in a group of four debaters and a one-to-one debating format. All debates had three phases: speech, rebuttal and clash. In the post-debate stage, the teachers provided feedback on the students’ written cases and asked them to revise and resubmit them.

2.