Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: expresión oral

Resumen:

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...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: expresión escrita

Resumen:

Debate pedagogy may hold great potential for improving second language (L2) writing skills. This study investigates this potential by examining the effects of a debate intervention on the quality of argumentative essays of Dutch secondary school students. The intervention consisted of a number of speaking and writing activities, including case-writing and note-taking. The study, which employed a pretest–posttest–delayed-posttest design with a control group, involved 135 students from eight classes at three secondary schools in the Netherlands. To measure the effects of the intervention, we analysed argumentative essays composed by the students on three occasions (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest). The students’ essays were analysed using a range of measures for fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and cohesion,...

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