6.3.4 Working from a written stimulus

Debates. These activities can be prepared in advance, where each student is assigned a role and given a dossier of relevant information upon which to found their argument. The temptation, with activities involving 'long turns', is for students to prepare in advance and reel off a rote-learned speech. The answer to this is for the tutor (and peers) to interrupt with questions; it should be known in advance that this will happen. Dossier-preparation ends up being rather time-consuming for tutors, so why not let more advanced groups develop their own role plays, following clear guidelines? They choose the topic as a class, perhaps from a shortlist prepared by the tutor to save time, assign themselves roles (which again the tutor can have thought about in advance) and research their own dossiers. This leads to greater learner autonomy, builds research skills into the programme and heightens interest. To ensure that students do compile a full dossier, make it known that the latter will be used with students in the year below for their debates. Encourage the class to assign a task to the role, and maybe build in a written follow-up activity. Mini-debates. If students are always asked to prepare in advance they may not develop enough confidence for speaking spontaneously. Colloquial assistants in our department a few years ago devised the mini-debate, for second-year undergraduates. Taking a controversial topic from the news (they chose, for example, the Clinton / Lewinski affair and Louise Woodward's release), they prepared in advance a role for each student, using just a paragraph of text, with maybe a headline or a photograph, as a stimulus to get them started. After just a few minutes' preparation they unleashed the debate. Since they had chosen sensationalist themes, the debate was usually found to be lively. Communication strategies. Consider making mini-debates correction-free, to encourage the students to take risks with what they say, as a fluency-increasing strategy (see 6.2.3.5), making it explicit to the students that this is what is happening. Pre-teach phrases for speakers to intervene, contradict, reinforce, etc. Encourage learners to develop ways to express or defend an opinion. A third strategy useful in debate and discussion is to teach students how to pick up on an interlocutor's words and use them for the purposes of their own argument.