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

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Abstract

Many secondary school students’ second language (L2) speaking skills suffer from deficiencies; the effects thereof are detrimental to their academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. Debate has been considered a potentially effective speaking pedagogical tool that can scaffold learning processes in ways that can lead to language development. This study investigates the effect of a debate intervention on English L2 speaking competence of Dutch secondary school students. Following a pretest–posttest control group design, we elicited speech samples from opinion tasks which we coded in terms of measures of speech quantity, fluency, complexity, accuracy and cohesion. Multilevel analysis results indicate that after the intervention, the intervention group produced more language which was more fluent, accurate, coherent and lexically more sophisticated relative to the control group. These findings, which have significant implications for L2 speaking development, are discussed in relation to specific characteristics of L2 debate pedagogy.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages22
JournalLanguage Teaching Research
Volume28
Issue number6
Early online date10 Oct 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2024

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has been financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; grant number 023.009.059).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.

Funding

FundersFunder number
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek023.009.059

    Keywords

    • L2 speaking instruction
    • L2 speaking skills
    • in-class debate
    • secondary education
    • speaking development

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