グローバル教育〔 地球的規模で考える 〕
PDA即興型英語ディベート
2025年度第５回即興型英語ディベート
On Monday July 14th, we held the fifth debate meeting of this academic year.
First, students were introduced to and practiced two more advanced debating techniques. The first was using one of your own team's points to rebut the other team. The second was using counterpoints to respond to rebuts.
Rebutting with one of your own team's point is powerful because it helps develop the debate's clashpoint in a way that shows your side to be stronger. This is especially helpful for the final speaker because they will need to summarize the debate and explain why your team is the winner. Saying your team is the winner is much easier if you can say that your ideas directly rebutted their ideas.
Counterpoints are used to reduce the effect of or completely negate rebuttals the other team uses. Some speakers must use them in PDA debates because they have to reconstruct their team's points, but all members should be ready to use counterpoints because they may need them when responding to POIs. Especially important is using the preparation time to predict what the other team might say as a rebuttal and prepare counterpoints for those things. Having counterpoints ready like this can quickly block the other team's rebuttals and make time management during your speeches easier.
After practice the skills outlined above, the students had a practice debate. The topic was Marrying at an older age is better than marrying young. 若くして結婚するより、年をとって結婚する方が良い。 For this debate, we did not use online judges. Instead the students talked about who they thought were the winners and why after debating. Because the debates were not official style, the teachers used the time to walk around and give advice to the students during the debate time. They especially focused on eye contact, gestures and volume. As usual, the students did very well. In particular, there were some good POI-rebuttal-counterpoint sequences that deepened some debates and made them very lively.
As usual, students were encouraged to review the materials they have been given until now and to read the news to have more information for future debates. Also, during the summer vacation they were told to practice using the AI debate system providede by the PDA organization. Finally, we will have students participating in the official PDA summer camp and we will have student participating in a smaller summer camp held in Osaka, so it will be a busy and enjoyable summer of debating.
Everyone, well done!
