Debate: Innovating Teaching Strategy for Enhancing Students’ Critical Thinking and Communication Skills

Debate: Innovating Teaching Strategy for Enhancing Students' Critical Thinking and Communication Skills

ABSTRACT

There are a lot of teaching strategies outside. Each of them has its own characteristic and speciality. Debate, one of teaching strategy, has an innovative characteristic in enhancing students' critical thinking. Debates have the ability to reinforce and enhance knowledge in a topic area, to engage students in the learning process, to verify that students have the ability to analyze the sources to various topics given. The purpose of this paper is to describe the utilization of structured classroom debates as a teaching strategy for critical thinking and enhancing communication skills.

INTRODUCTION

English is widely spoken around the world nowadays. Many people are learning it as foreign language through formal and informal school. In Indonesia, English as a foreign language has been put into the school curriculum by government. The government realizes that there is a need to be able to speak English in this global era.

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Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

Moreover, the English learning itself should be started at young age. Therefore, the English learning activity has been started since in the elementary school, even in the kindergarten, up to university.

Language teaching has two big elements inside. They are language skills and language components. The language skills are the required skills to comprehend receptive language and use expressive language to communicate, such as reading, writing, listening and speaking. On the other hand language components are pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Those mention above take important roles in language teaching, especially English language teaching and they are linked one another.

Speaking seems take the most important part in both language teaching and learning activity. According to Hornby (1974), "Speaking is making use of words in an ordinary voice, uttering words, knowing and being able to use a language, expressing oneself in...