Research has painted a pessimistic picture of students’ second language (L2) writing skills in secondary education. One innovative tool that may help students foster their L2 proficiency, including writing ability, is in‐class debate. Debate is commonly associated with oral communication and argumentation skills. However, debate may also offer advantages as an effective vehicle for L2 writing instruction. This study evaluates the effect of a debate intervention on the writing competence of Dutch secondary‐school students. The intervention consisted of a number of speaking and writing activities, including case writing and note taking. The study, which employed a pretest–posttest design with a control group, involved 8 classes at 3 secondary schools in the Netherlands (N = 146). To measure the effect of the intervention, we analyzed 2 opinion writing tasks produced by the students: just prior to the first debate (pretest) and approximately 10 weeks later (posttest). We used a variety of measures, tapping into different aspects of writing performance, including fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and cohesion. Multilevel analysis of the data revealed that the students in the intervention group significantly improved on a number of measures in comparison to the control group.

中文翻译：

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辩论作为第二语言教学法：辩论对中学教育写作发展的影响

研究描绘了学生对中学英语第二语言（L2）写作技巧的悲观印象。课堂辩论是一种可以帮助学生提高二语能力（包括写作能力）的创新工具。辩论通常与口头交流和辩论技巧有关。但是，辩论作为L2写作指导的有效手段也可能会带来优势。这项研究评估了辩论干预对荷兰中学生写作能力的影响。干预包括许多演讲和写作活动，包括案例写作和笔记记录。这项研究与对照组进行了前测-后测设计，该研究涉及荷兰3所中学的8个班级（N= 146）。为了衡量干预的效果，我们分析了学生提出的2项意见写作任务：在第一次辩论之前（预测试）和大约10周后（后测试）。我们使用了多种方法，利用了写作表现的不同方面，包括流利程度，句法和词汇复杂性，准确性和内聚性。数据的多层次分析显示，与对照组相比，干预组的学生在多项措施上有显着改善。