Developing a Professional Style for Student Debaters at University

Debating has been considered an efficient activity to improve essential skills for language learners. That might explain why this activity has been part of the curriculum of many teaching programs across the field. One of the most important aspects of a successful debate is the confident and persuasive delivery of the content. It is, therefore, important that teachers help students build a professional style with the activities specifically designed for this development. This experimental study suggests one such activity and aims to analyze its effects on students' improvement. The activity involves sending students videos of debaters with satisfactory manners. Each student was then required to choose one turn of speech that they found impressive and recorded themselves delivering that speech. They were to imitate exactly the speed, the tone, the volume, the gestures and expressions, and the eye contact made by the original speaker, and then submit the video to the teacher for feedback. This procedure was repeated several times during the course, with the same or different speeches each time. Data analysis revealed the evident progress in the delivery the students made in front of the whole class. Another implication was that the high levels of confidence presented by the debaters and the effective communication and persuasiveness of their arguments seemed to be attributable to the number and quality of the recordings.