Abstract
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 scaffold learning processes in ways that can lead to language development. This study investigates the effect of a debate intervention on English L2 speaking competence of Dutch secondary school students. Following a pretest–posttest control group design, we elicited speech samples from opinion tasks which we coded in terms of measures of speech quantity, fluency, complexity, accuracy and cohesion. Multilevel analysis results indicate that after the intervention, the intervention group produced more language which was more fluent, accurate, coherent and lexically more sophisticated relative to the control group. These findings, which have significant implications for L2 speaking development, are discussed in relation to specific characteristics of L2 debate pedagogy.
Highlights
The ability to speak a second (L2) or foreign language (FL) properly is an arduous task considering the interwoven factors that come into play when acquiring this ability (Richards & Renandya, 2002; Romaña Correa, 2015; Shumin, 2002)
The results show that the intervention students made a significant improvement in both quantity measures: quantity of speech (F(1, 277.886) = 31.1; p < .001) and number of words produced (F(1, 279.881) = 33.9; p < .001), with large effect sizes
The present study has offered empirical evidence that debate can play a facilitative role in enhancing L2 speaking proficiency
Summary
The ability to speak a second (L2) or foreign language (FL) properly is an arduous task considering the interwoven factors that come into play when acquiring this ability (Richards & Renandya, 2002; Romaña Correa, 2015; Shumin, 2002). Speaking is a cognitively and socially taxing skill; it entails encoding and expressing thoughts in speech streams that make sense and are contextually appropriate (Goh, 2017). Richards and Renandya (2002) stated that ‘a large percentage of the world’s language learners study English in order to develop proficiency in speaking’ Learners need to speak English well for better academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. It is no wonder that many studies (e.g. Zare & Othman, 2015) have expressed concern about the speaking ability of L2/FL learners
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