First Debate

On July 08th Eduardo, Rodrigo, Dreny and Nicole presented their debate. Their topic was the LOCE (Ley Constitucional de enseñanza) which was published on march 10th, 1990. This law gave the chance to many people of getting involve in the education system in Chile. This law, even though it wasn't good, allowed education to be for everyone in this country.

Dreny and Nicole presented the topic and then Eduardo and Rodrigo created the debate. Our class was separated into to groups. The ones in favor of the LOCE were in one side and the ones against the LOCE were in the other side. I was with the ones in favor and it was very difficult to recognize the positive things of this law. We said that without LOCE we wouldn't have been able to reach the education system that we have now and that the ideal of this law was a long term proposal.

The debate worked very well. My classmates controlled the situation at all times and we gave our opinions respectfully.

Debating in a EFL Classroom.

On June 24th, Mr Litman showed us how a debate should work. He gave us the necessary information to start working in our debates. He showed us a presentation about teaching debate in the EFL classroom. (English foreign language).

The first point was about the benefits of teaching debate in a EFL classroom.

The arguments were the following: To increase our speaking skills, share opinions, develop critical thinking skills, criticize, introduce global issues and develop research skills.

The objectives were:

- Sts should understand and be able to share their opinions, they should become more aware of global and cross-cultural issues, they should gain experience in research and they should increase their knowledge and comprehension of English.

Then there were the steps to follow:

1- Opinions. What is it? How do you express it?
2- Expressing your opinions. Giving reasons. Strong reasons, types of reasons and brainstorming.
3- Supporting your opinion. Opinion-Reason-Support. Types of support and intro to research.
4- Organizing your opinions. Signposts. Organizing an speech. Debate introductions and conclusions.
5- Refutation. Refuting Opinions, types of refutations, stating a refutation, relevance of the refutation.
6- Challenging supports. Testing support (questionable), stating refutation of a source.
7- Organizing your refutation. Organizing the negative case, listen, attack, rebuild. Negative introduction. Refutation format.
8- Debating your opinion. Debate formats, responding to attacks, Taking notes, debate delivery.

To incorporate debate into a classroom you can try brainstorming in your classes, asking for ideas and opinions. This way you can increase the participation in the class and see how well your students are at giving opinions and thinking.

At the end of the class Mr Litman gave us a list with the topics that we are going to use in our debates.

June 17th

On June 17th Mr. Litman talked us about our blogs and our development in the class. Analyzing our participation in the class we realized that we haven’t used communicative strategies very much. We participate giving our opinions sometimes but that is not enough. At the end of the class Mr Litman told us that from now on we were going to do a debate. Micro teaching weren’t participative enough. Now we will be able to make our classmates participate giving their own personal opinions and arguments about an specific topic.