Making Debate Fun for EFL Students
By: Julia Daley
You might say I’m a bit of a debate nerd. I’ve taught plenty of debate in the USA with highly motivated native-speaking Advanced Placement (AP) students and passionately opinionated university freshmen. With student populations like those, I mostly just had to worry about building in guardrails for my students so that debates ran smoothly and no feathers were unduly ruffled. On one memorable occasion, my class of 24 composition students wound up in a shockingly heated discussion over the merits and demerits of pickles on hamburgers—let’s just say I never forgot the importance of setting boundaries for maintaining respectful classroom dialogues after that.
My EFL students in Japan, though? Their needs were so vastly different that I had to reinvent how I taught debate entirely. Fortunately, I think I’ve had reasonable success teaching EFL debate, and I think the reason my lessons went well were due to two key factors: understanding my teaching context and applying a bit of brain science to my lesson plans.
The context
The debate lessons I’ll share today come from when I was a high-school teacher in Japan. I taught a once-a-week 50-minute English conversation class to first-year students, all about 15 years old. They had English grammar courses three days a week with other teachers, so the goal of my class was for students to learn how to apply and use the English they’d been studying. Each class had 40 students, so I was joined by a Japanese support teacher to help manage the large number of students. We ran the class using only English, and occasionally added Japanese keyword support to our materials.
This was a public high school with an emphasis on research, and the school year was divided into three terms. I was given full leeway to create my own curriculum; there was no textbook, and previous teachers in my role had cobbled together lessons from an assortment of worksheets. I’m a personal fan of project-based learning, and for the first term, I designed a unit that was research-focused: students interviewed their peers in English, prepared research posters, and then presented their findings. The unit was such a success that the posters were displayed at the school festival! This first project set the stage for the rest of the school year, as the students had an understanding of my expectations for the class: they would have to use English in various ways, develop their research skills, and collaborate with their peers.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with the curriculum for the second term, which is when the other English teachers approached me with a conundrum. Every year, our high school entered a prefectural English debate contest and lost terribly to the other schools. My colleagues wanted me to teach my students how to debate, with the hope of unlocking their heretofore undiscovered passion for it; then maybe, just maybe, we could recruit a powerful team of debaters for the debate contest that winter. And so, the focus of Term 2 would be debate.
Obviously, my students would need to practice the language needed for debating and expressing opinions. Easy enough, in theory. The first few lessons would be focused on having students practice their comparatives and superlatives, learning how to agree and disagree with each other in English, and sharing in English the reasons behind their opinions. They worked in pairs and small groups, and the topics were relatively simple ones that were aligned with my students’ interests:
- Studio Ghibli movies are better than Disney movies.
- K-pop groups are cooler than J-pop groups.
- Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki is more delicious than Kansai-style okonomiyaki.
For my students, these were topics they all had opinions about and didn’t require complex vocabulary knowledge for them to talk about (compared with, say, debating about the pros and cons of legal immigration).
Debate is more than just expressing agreement or disagreement, though. There’s an entire process, from conducting research, preparing opening and closing statements, to giving rebuttals. We’d practiced doing research in the first term, so that was a skill my students could continue developing in this new debate unit. However, my students had never held a debate in their native languages, let alone in English. Debate is just not something that is typically done in Japanese classrooms, at least not by that point in their careers as students. That meant I needed to teach foundational lessons in the structure of debate.
The brainy bit
Preparing for debates takes time and effort, and I didn’t expect all 240 students to be intrinsically motivated debaters. That meant I needed to create a compelling scaffold to these next lessons so that my students would be willing to learn the foundations of debate. If I wanted buy-in and cooperation from 40 kids in a room, I needed to create an externally motivating reason for the students to want to debate (or at least to want to learn how to).
For my students, I identified a tempting prize: an end-of-term movie to watch in class. Why not have my students debate about the movie they’d then watch at the end of the term? As far as I was concerned, it’d be a win-win-win: they got to watch a movie they’d actually like watching, they’d practice debate, and it’d give the students a sense of agency in my class. Having the students take some control over their own learning (however minor) was a step towards developing self-efficacy. As an even better bonus, I wouldn’t have to watch the same movie six times in a row (as I expected each class to have different winning movies). And honestly, that last reason was pretty externally motivating for me as the teacher. I clung to that reward of six different movies to power me through all the material development I had to do during the always-too-short school break between terms.
The great movie debate
It took a bit of pre-planning on my part to make these movie-debate lessons work, but it was very worth the effort. First, I plotted out a list of movies that a) I had access to (either via DVD or streaming services), b) were no more than 100 minutes long (so they could be watched over no more than two class periods), and c) were age-appropriate. I sorted the list into different genres, and I then prepared a survey for the students which asked them about their top three favorite movie genres. Using the survey results, I was then able to put students into groups of five (creating eight groups in a class of 40 students), each one dedicated to a particular genre (animation, action, comedy, etc).
The high school had a dedicated computer lab space which we took advantage of. The groups were given the curated list of movies they could choose from for their respective genres and had to decide for themselves which movie they’d pick for their group. They then researched their movies: the synopsis, the cast, the reviews, etc. They drafted opening and closing statements about why their movie was the best choice to watch and prepared any props or evidence (like photos or songs from the movies) they could use to support their points. This took place over a couple of class periods.
Once the research was done, the students were ready to debate. The debates had four distinct sections: an opening statement from both groups (order determined via rock-paper-scissors, or janken as it’s called in Japanese), two rounds of rebuttals, and then ending with closing statements. The groups were expected to take notes on their opponents’ arguments and were given time between each phase of the debate to confer and prepare their next statements. I supplied handouts to help scaffold the note-taking process for the students.
For the first round of debates, my co-teacher and I split the class in half, with each of us supervising 20 students (or four debate groups). Two debates would happen simultaneously, one in each half of the room. The non-debating students would sit and watch and then had to rate each debating group and vote for a winner. My co-teacher and I monitored the debates, kept the time, and then tabulated the ballots. Once finished, the groups would switch, and the next set of students would debate. With all going smoothly, there was enough time to do two debates in a single class period with a bit of wiggle room leftover.
I did my best to design the ballots so that groups could be measured for different things: the clarity of their speaking voices, the ease with which their arguments could be understood by the (student) listeners, and whether all group members contributed equally during the debate. I did not want to pressure the students to evaluate each others’ English abilities, as that was not the purpose of these debates, so there were no items about language or grammar. Instead, I wanted the students to focus on being heard and understood. Collaboration was an essential element of the course, so I wanted the groups to be judged for how well they worked together. Shared speaking time was a simple proxy for overall teamwork that the student audience could measure.
In the next class, the top four groups played rock-paper-scissors to determine the debate order for the semi-finals. This time, the groups debated in front of the whole class. As before, the students in the audience were expected to rate the groups’ performances on ballots and then vote for a winner. To help break things up between the debates, the “listening” students were asked to discuss their reasons for voting for a particular group with partners while the semi-finalists could use the time to practice together. Once again, my co-teacher and I live-counted the results and announced the finalists at the end of the class.
The final debate was held in the next class, and the winning group’s movie would be played in the following two class periods (to finish out the term and be a welcome respite from the students’ midterm exams in their other courses). The stakes were high, and the finalists were eager to have their movies come out on top. The procedures went as before, but since we’d be holding a single debate, we allowed for more “conference” time between phases. While the debate groups conferred, the student audience members worked on a slightly-more-elaborate ballot than previously, which asked them to rate each phase of the debate for the two groups (“Which group had the best opening statement? Why do you think so?”), articulate a reason, and then choose an overall winner. Once the debate was over, my colleague and I collected and tabulated the ballots. While we did so, the whole class reflected on the debate lessons in their journals (reflecting in daily journals was something they did regularly for their homeroom teachers). With much theatrics and a loud, 32-student-drum-roll, the winning movie was announced and its supporting team congratulated.
On reflection
While planning this debate unit, I of course hoped it would go well with my students, but I wasn’t entirely sure how well it would. There were so many moving parts and logistics that needed to work as planned or else the entire unit would quickly fall apart. Fortunately, it all went pretty smoothly, though the simultaneous debates got very hectic and noisy.
I was really quite surprised at how intense some groups became about the whole process, and that passion became rather contagious: as each group worked feverishly on preparing for the movie debates, it motivated their peers to put in a similar amount of effort. For maybe the only time in my teaching career, none of my students slept in class while watching the winning movies.
Alas for my coworkers’ high hopes, our debate team that year still got clobbered during the English debate competition. The students made a valiant effort, but they didn’t stand a chance when matched against bilingual students from international high schools. (Don’t ask me why the competition didn’t make separate brackets for non-native and fully-bilingual students, as that’s an answer I still don’t have.) The students weren’t disheartened, though. Of course, they’d hoped that they’d win, especially after many late evenings spent at school practicing and researching for the competition. They were all pleased with how much their English had improved while preparing for the tournament, and they were already plotting what they’d do differently for the next year to try and get a higher ranking. After the competition was finished, the debate team rewarded themselves by watching all of the non-winning movies in my classroom after school. It took the rest of the school year for us to finish watching them all!
Julia Daley is a senior lecturer and Assessment Coordinator at Hiroshima Bunkyo University. She received her Masters in TESOL from Northern Arizona University, and she’s certified to teach Secondary English in Arizona. She’s mainly taught writing and EFL in high schools and universities in the USA and Japan. In her free time, she’s an avid watcher of movies.