Exploring Teachers’and Students’Attitudes towards the Role of Classroom Debate in Enhancing Learners’Critical Thinking

Abstract

This work tries to investigate the effect of classroom debate on developing of students’ critical thinking. Though both teachers and students of English language recognize the importance of critical thinking skill, they neglect to develop it. Therefore, teachers are required to help their students to promote their critical thinking and choose the appropriate strategies and tools to achieve this objective. Correspondingly, classroom debate is one of the recommended techniques by many scholars and educationalists to be used for this purpose. It is an activity through which learners can practice many critical thinking skills. Consequently, their critical thinking would be enhanced. Thus, we hypothesize that if teachers use debate in the classroom, students’critical thinking will be enhanced. This research tends mainly to explore both teachers’and students’attitudes towards the use of classroom debate to enhance critical thinking. Also, it sheds light on the importance of both critical thinking as an important skill, and in-class debate as an innovative tool for teaching and learning. In order to affirm the research hypothesis and achieve its aims, two varied questionnaires were administered and distributed to sixty students of first year Master level and fifteen teachers of different modules. After analyzing the findings of both questionnaires, it is indicated that classroom debate helps students to perceive issues from different perspectives, think adequately and thus, reach evident conclusions and establish credible data. These abilities are the major features related to critical thinking. This assumes that many of first year Master students and their teachers believe that classroom debate acts as an effective tool in enhancing critical thinking. On the basis of these results, it is recommended that teachers should raise students’awareness towards the importance of critical thinking skill, and help them develop it through the use of classroom debate.