Sample Lesson Plan and Implementation
Classroom: 8 students, 4th and 5th graders at roughly high-beginning (or low-intermediate) English speaking ability
Timeframe: 40 minute class period (with 5 minutes removed from lesson plan for "administrative tasks" at beginning of class)
Goal: Learn a simplified classroom debating style and have a simplified debate on a topic chosen by the teacher
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Part I [5 minutes]. Introduction: What is debate? Present a topic, and choose "teams" (sides, PRO or CON) for the debate. The debate question will be: Is homework good or bad?
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Part II [10 minutes]. Demonstration: Explain how to have a debate. These students have never had debate in English before. When debate is a "new" concept like this, the best way to explain what it is is to simply demonstrate it for the students. My prefered way of doing this is to actually act out both sides of a very short, simple debate for the students to see. For a first debate and at this lower level of ability, I generally do exactly the topic that the kids will be doing. This actually models the sorts of statements and ideas the kids can use for their own debate speeches. The kids think it's a lot of fun to see me pretending to "argue with myself."
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Part III [10 minutes]. Prepare: Each team must organize what ideas they have to support their side of the debate topic, and decide who will present which ideas. I always allow the students to do this using Korean and their dictionaries, because this helps them to integrate as a team, and it helps to activate the appropriate cognitive areas in their minds so that the English they use is more easily understood and learned. This is especially important with lower-level students who have very little experience with debate (in either their native language or in English).
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Part IV [10 minutes]. Go!: Have a debate. At this low level of ability, a successful debate speech is very short. Less than 30 seconds, maybe 2 or 3 sentences. It's over pretty fast, but the students get a great sense of engagement and accomplishment when the teacher assigns points to their mini-presentations and they see one of the teams winning.