Using debates in the secondary classroom

English is not just correct words in the correct form and in the correct order — it is a means of communication in real life.  And to communicate well you have to be able to state your opinions, provide reasoning for them, strengthen them with examples and also deal with contradictions. Using debates in the classroom can help enhance these abilities so let’s have a look at how to do it.

Debate format

But what is a debate? There is a so-called classical debate format created by Karl Popper. It is widely used in education all over the world starting with primary schools. In brief, the teacher chooses one topic or ‘affirmation’  for every 6 students, three of them form a team and have to prepare ‘pros’ and the other three ‘cons’. As a rule, students have some preparation or ‘research’ time at home or in the class (then, according to Popper, it’ll take 8 minutes) to get ready and can use any resources they want. The format of the debate is not 1-to-1 but in a chain where the next speaker of the group connects their speech to the previous one opposing to them and re-establishing or developing their team’s points (1pro-to-1con-to-2pro-to-2con-to-3pro-to-3con). The other groups can act as judges or there can be polls at the end to give students a competitive spirit.  

You can find more information about Karl Popper’s debates here.

What are the benefits of debates?

There is a number of benefits, both in terms of learning and language acquisition and developing intrapersonal students’ skills, as debates:

• increase students critical thinking abilities;
• teach students to present their point;
• teach students to structure their point;
• teach students to speak in public;
• increase students’ confidence;
• increase students’ retention of information learned;
• improve students’ listening and note-taking skills (when they have to connect their speech).

How to start

Provide a Model and Notice. It refers to both the language to use and the procedure.

First, practise 1-to-1 debates. As for the procedure, I would start with watching a sample of 1-2-1 debate. Once you watch a debate video (e.g. this one), discuss with the students all or a few of the following questions:

• How long was the speech?
• What was the topic?
• What is the speaker’s opinion on the topic?
• How many reasons has the speaker given?
• How many contradictions has he had?
• How did he feel? (e. g. nervous or confident)

As for the language, it’s hardly possible to start with holding a full round of debates once your students have not developed the three following basic skills, so make it like a snowball:

1. Teach stating your point and reasoning.

Step 1. For lower levels it can be just express 1 preference out of 2 and support it with one reason: I prefer .. to …, I’d rather…, I would choose…, I would decide on… , I would go for ….( e. g. I prefer tea to coffee because it is tastier to me.)

Step 2. Then, add two reasons (e.g. I prefer coffee to tea because I find the taste better and it helps me keep awake in the evening)

Step 3. Next, support with two reasons and provide examples from your own or your friends’ experience, it can be some statistics as well.

Step 4. Finally, ‘upgrade’ the language,  use phrases like ‘The first point is..’, ‘The next point is..’ , substitute ‘because’ with ‘as’, ‘since’ and so on.

And for higher levels, it can be TOEFL questions 1 & 2 to practice.

2. Teach disagreeing with your opponent’s point: The way I see it …, There is some point in it but…

3. Teach connecting ideas to the previous speaker: ‘As A has already mentioned,...’

Timing

Be realistic about the level and prior experience, if it’s a new skill to be developed, cater for your students’ comfort. Let it be 30 seconds, to begin with, prolonged to 1 minute when they feel confident and to 1,5 — 2 minutes later on. It could be useful to have the cards with signs ’30 sec’, ‘1 min’ (maybe ’10 sec’ or 20 sec’, as well) to show them how much time is left.

Teach ‘Extra’ Language

Pay attention to something beyond verbal communication – body language and emotions the people have, discuss those with your students. You need both to read those and show them yourself to get the message better across. Actually, it has to do a lot with public speaking once you debate in front of the class.

Topics

Be careful while choosing the topics with juniors and teens as plenty of the topics offered in the books can be seen as either highly moralizing or too abstract by your students. As a result, there might be little room for juniors and teens to express their own view, or most importantly, feelings or attitudes towards it.

Topics can be chosen by field of knowledge — sport, health, education issues, by manner of presenting — controversial (more stating your personal opinion), argumentative (when both parties might have strong factual points) or persuasive (aiming to drag you onto my side), by motion — they address value issues, facts or policies of organizations or government. You can find some topics here.

Meaningful and  relevant

Once we state that through English we can teach teens some life-skills, why not teach them something really relevant to them and provide them with some experience they really can make part of their everyday life afterwards? To get them involved they need to see their own incentive — I would go for helping them create such an effective communicative tool like requesting adults.

There is a number of books on psychology written in the form of dialogues between an adult and a teen, where a teen says what they want to do and an adult contradicts providing reasoning. And a beneficial debate I see looks pretty much the same — the students can be divided into two groups, adults (teachers or parents, more exactly, as opponents) and teens, respectively. Each of the parties states their opinions, reasons and examples true to life. It can help teens understand their parents better besides just practising English skills.

Once the learners have got used to the format of debates, developed the necessary skills, you can try out having unprepared debates.