Students� Critical Thinking Skills in a Classroom Debate

Abstract

Mastering argumentative discourse both in written and oral is a must for students nowadays. However, a successful argumentative discourse requires high thinking order skill such as developing a stance, analyzing arguments, distinguishing facts and opinions, solving problems, comparing and contrasting material, and making inferences. Realizing the importance roles of critical thinking in constructing argumentative discourse, this study focuses on students performance in debate specifically argument, counter-argument, and rebuttals. They are chosen since they are always taken into consideration in assessing students debate performance.DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2016.190208

Examining Debate in Developing Higher-order Thinking Skills: A Case of English Language Class in Senior High School Context

“…Another study by Iman (2017) also shows the impacts of debate instruction in EFL Classroom on critical thinking and speaking skills by giving speaking tests using SOLOM (Student Oral Language Observation Matrix) and critical thinking rubric which is also a qualitative assessment. A study by Handayani (2017) also describe the students' critical thinking skills by conducting classroom debate and analyzing the data in the form of students' arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttal. Just as the previous studies, Malone and Michael (2018) finds the effect of a debate-based pedagogy on students' critical thinking levels by evaluating their speaking skills during classroom debate instead of using a self-report questionnaire to rate themselves.…”