The exercises for teaching English teacher trainees to debate

Abstract

The article presents the subsystem of exercises for teaching English teacher trainees to debate. Following the “bottomup” approach to teaching speaking, five stages of teaching debate have been clarified, such as introduction to debate, which gives the understanding of basic debate notions and speech situations of debating; teaching speaking turns, aimed at developing argumentation skills in speeches using specific form of debate cases; teaching dialogical units, with the purpose of teaching counterargumentation skills while exchanging opinions; teaching minidebate, in which students are trained in flowing the debate, assessing the participants of the debate and practicing minidebate; and, finally, teaching debate, directed to further development of all debating skills. In accordance with the defined stages and the types of teaching units, eleven groups of exercises for teaching speech skills and logical and compositional skills of debating have been defined. The classification of exercises for teaching debate based on the criteria of communicativeness, information reception or production, game component presence, prompts presence, way and place of exercising and research component presence has been suggested. The examples of exercises to each of the groups, revealing the peculiarities of teaching debate, have been provided and described, using the suggested classification.

Keywords

• дебати
• майбутні викладачі англійської мови
• мовленнєві і логіко композиційні вміння ведення дебатів
• класифікація вправ
• підсистема вправ