ACCIDENTAL LESSONS: TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS AND COLLABORATION BY TEACHING DEBATE

ACCIDENTAL LESSONS: TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS AND COLLABORATION BY TEACHING DEBATE

Standerfer, Christina

From January 2013 to May 2013, I developed and presented a series of workshops on effective policy debate for young Albanian political leaders. These U.S Embassy- sponsored workshops consisted of over forty-two hours of graduate level instruction over a six-week period and culminated with three nationally televised debates. In this paper, I describe the progression of the instruction during these workshops and participants’ evolving relationships with each other and with the English language. I argue that by using a variety of pedagogical approaches including group work, video modeling, self critiques and peer critiques, participants learned far more than how to be effective policy debaters. Informal discussions with participants outside the classroom suggest many became more comfortable expressing themselves not only in English but also in their native Albanian. Moreover, when the workshops began participants often exhibited hostile behaviors and verbal aggression toward their political opponents, but by the end of the six weeks of training many had become friends despite their political differences. Building on lessons learned from this experience, I offer a model for teachers of second languages to use that includes teaching advanced language learners the basic principles of policy debate as a way to improve their written and oral language skills and their collaborative skills. Keywords: Policy debate training; second language acquisition, collaborative skills

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3385