Journal Entry 7 –Debate Experience in Listening and Speaking class

At the end of this semester, I have finished two English debates in Viphavee’s Listening and Speaking class. It is marvelous that all of my classmates did a good job, making me learn a lot from them. Did I improve my English listening and speaking skills, learning more abilities such as critical thinking, justifiable arguing, factual evidencing, being deeply knowledgeable, logical and educated person? Let me make some self-examination.

First of all, I would like to talk about my preparing of my debates. To be honest, preparing for a debate really takes me a lot of time, but through the process of searching information, I learned informative knowledge and enjoyed it a lot as well. For the reason that in a debate, there are two different teams speaking against, I had two partners as a team. Due to both of them are sophomores, the discussions among us really help me. Furthermore, I also asked some friends who are good at debating, having debate experience for help. Besides, I really appreciate people who did me a flavor, including my sweet partners and friends. There are also some videos that teacher shared with us, one is lecture about learning debate and the other one is real practice about debate. Trying to listen to what they said, I repeat the words again and again. They help me to understand what Asian Parliament English Debate format will be, how the arguments and proofs can be organized, and most important of all, seeing the real debate competition to have a chance to broad my eyes, experiencing the debate atmospheres.

Standing on the stage is one of my big problems. I find that I get nervous easily on the stage, being afraid of losing some words I anticipate to say. In the first time of my debate, I try to get rid of my draft and give myself a lot of confident, trying to do my best on the stage. However, what I present is pretty terrible with a number of utterances. Even the simple word, I still go blank in my brain. Therefore, for the second debate, I consider whether draft is necessary for me or not. At last, I decide to bring my draft on the stage. With the draft, I rely on it a lot, reading them to the audience. I am now still keeping thinking that whether my decision which allows me to bring my draft on the stage is a good idea or not.

For these two times of debate, I experience the interesting but difficult skills of debating. Through these challenges, I think that I improve a little bit with my public-speaking ability. Let me tell you a secret, that is, when I listen to my own speeches which teacher took when we were debating, I find I was so ridiculous that speaking like a fly. Ha!