Skills such as identifying evidence, evaluating the credibility of information sources, analyzing complex historical and geopolitical issues from multiple perspectives, asking good questions, and forming and articulating a point of view are useful for succeeding in school and in life. Speech and debate training can help students learn and practice…

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…

This study is aimed at identifying the speaking assessment methods in multilingual English Language Teaching (ELT) in the Philippines. It also determined the perception of the English language teachers towards the effectiveness of the varied speaking assessment practices in the multilingual classroom. The results of this exploratory sequential…

Students at languages and translation departments at Saudi universities take listening and speaking courses. Before the pandemic, the students used to complete the activities in the textbooks which required them to engage in many real-life, face-to-face individual and/or collaborative small-group activities in the classroom such as role-playing,…

The authors identify competitive speech and debate as a form of play that helped democratize American citizenship for the poor, who used what they learned through the practice to advance their personal social and economic goals. In addition, this competitive activity led to the development of speech communication as an academic discipline and…

This article presents an activity that engages students in a fun and collaborative process of learning, with a primary objective of teaching them how to identify and label formal and informal argumentative fallacies. After playing a variation of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?," students ought to be better prepared to craft stronger arguments and…

Many controversial subjects characterize geography in the 21st century. Issues such as climate change, sustainability and social exclusion generate much discussion and often involve clear differences in opinion of how they might be addressed. Higher education is an important space for critical engagement with challenging issues. Preparing for and…

Essentialist representations of the Orientalised Other abound within the literature of intercultural communication. The dominant discourse constructs Chinese-speaking students as members of a homogenised collective: passive recipients of knowledge who are reliant on a reproductive approach to learning. This article seeks to offer a corrective to…

According to Ur (1996, 120), "of all the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), speaking seems intuitively the most important." Indeed, whether for business or pleasure, a primary motivation to learn a second language is to be able to converse with speakers of that language. However, in addition to being an important…

Questions the theoretical justification for the standard of intrinsic justification. Challenges the applicability of phenomenological constructs to academic debate, demonstrates that "essences" cannot be readily located in debate resolutions, and illustrates that proponents of intrinsic justification have not adequately operationalized…

The judging philosophy form has been in use at the CEDA National Tournament since 1987, and its use at the NDT has been a mainstay for quite some time. The judging philosophy statement is a document listing a series of topic areas or common issues on which the prospective judge is to elaborate so his or her views will be known to the debate…

Keeping debate communicative is a great and recurring concern. A study investigated whether debate format may influence debaters' communicative behavior, by comparing behavior in Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Lincoln-Douglas debate (LD) and in CEDA Team debate. Videotapes of the two first affirmative speeches of each, at the…

Despite literally tens of thousands of rounds of debate competition over a number of years, little insight into argumentation theory has resulted. Debate as practiced by college debating teams has become a laboratory for perfecting itself. Permitting the divergence of debate from argumentation forfeits an ideal opportunity to study argumentation.…

A rules-based approach to the problems of debate (such as that proposed by the American Debate Association) will fail to provide a solution to debate's ills and may only increase the problems. Debate's current problems have to do with debate performance, e.g., speaking rate, poor quality evidence, and irrational arguments. A solution to these…

Analyzes the actual substance and procedure of legal jurisdiction to argue that (1) the theory of subject matter jurisdiction is inappropriately applied to debate, and (2) the theory of personal jurisdiction implies recognition in debate practice of important procedural characteristics of the jurisdictional challenge. (SR)