Debate holds promise as a conducive mechanism for second language writing development. We will present the findings of a longitudinal study that we conducted in three secondary schools in which we explored the potential of L2 debating tasks for developing L2 writing skills.
As a teacher of English as a second language (L2) I have been experimenting with different pedagogical tools in search of teaching tools that are motivational and facilitative of L2 acquisition. One teaching tool that seemed to embody these two qualities is debate. I have observed that students become highly motivated once being engaged in debating activities and manage to hone their language skills after participating in a number of debates. This observation has inspired me to conduct a PhD research to explore the potential of debate as a conducive mechanism for L2 acquisition. In this presentation, we will shed light on one facet of this potential of debate. We will present the findings of a longitudinal study about the potential of L2 debating tasks for developing L2 writing skills. The study is based on a debate intervention, which employed a pretest-posttest design with control groups, involved eight classes at three secondary schools in The Netherlands (n= 146). The debate intervention included a number of speaking and writing activities, including summarizing preparatory articles, case writing, and note taking. The control groups received typical instruction based on textbooks, including controlled speaking and writing tasks, such as writing letters and essays. To measure the effect of the intervention, we analyzed two opinion writing tasks produced by the students. We used a variety of measures, tapping into different aspects of writing performance, including fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and cohesion. Multilevel analysis of the data revealed that the treatment group outperformed the control group on a number of measures: text length, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy and cohesion. These findings indicate that in-class debating tasks in L2 are effective for developing L2 writing proficiency. Challenges and affordances of longitudinal research by teachers in classroom settings will be also illustrated and discussed.
