ESL debating
Do you hold debates in your ESL classes? With a motivated and imaginative group of students, debates can be a very good method of improving communication skills.If your students are good enough, they might even follow in the footsteps of a group of students from the International Islamic University in Malaysia, who have won the ESL category at the 27th World Universities Debating Championship in Vancouver, Canada, seeing off a challenge from university teams from India, Sweden and Israel.
A member of the winning team, Suhaib Hassan, is quoted as saying that the university “understand[s] the importance of debate in sharpening a student’s skills in critical thinking and communication”.
If you’ve held debates in your classes, what have your students debated about? Post a comment below…
January 17th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
I had my students debate the topic of corporal punishment by teachers and parents and to my surprise the majority of them (8 out of 10, young adults, mainly European) were in favour of some measure of corporal punishment. Is this a common result?
January 25th, 2007 at 11:38 am
I debated this issue once with a group of European adults, and they had mixed views about corporal punishment by parents. But they were all adamantly opposed to corporal punihsment by teachers - they seemed to think that it was up to the parents to decide if that was a road they wanted to go down.