Abstract:

Motivating Students using Debate

By Andrew Reimann and Nobuo Tokumatsu

With the coming of the new millennium, some methods of education must also change especially at university and college level. The most important problem we have now is the question of how to enhance student’s communication abilities in English. In the United States, debate is a very popular and frequently used method of education. In Japan however, at junior and high school level debate is being introduced as means to activate and stimulate the class. A debate match using English has broadly been carried among students of The English Speaking Society club (ESS). However, in the classroom, debate has not yet been introduced into the university as part of English education. In the present paper the authors would like to report the results of a theoretical and empirical study regarding debate and how it changes the attitude of the students in the classroom towards learning English. Subsequently this paper will endeavor to report and suggest how to orchestrate a debate match in the classroom and some of the problems which might arise.