Debate





Students are fantastic at expressing themselves in their mother tongue, but when it comes to performing the same task in a second language it more often than not poses a significant problem. I researched the Internet and various books as to how to overcome this problem, students had told me that they had memorised set sentences that reflected various emotions.

These memorised sentences were being applied in both formal and informal structures. I decided to introduce debates to my classes and the subjects would be more effective if the student was passionate about a particular topic. Here are a few subjects that we have discussed in class:

Paper is better than a word processor?

The euro arguments for and against

The mobile phone, is it a good thing or a bad thing?



After the lessons, I noted that 70 percent of students wanted to know how to express anger in different situations, these included: at a supermarket, bus, taxi, in conversation. Perhaps the most interesting observation was that the students wanted to know more about synonyms and antonyms. They wanted to know alternative sentence constructions and the circumstances as to when and how to apply.

All these factors have been taken into account and I continuously use debate style lesson plans for conversational classes. If you would like to know more about these type of classes, contact me today!



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