THE IMPLEMENTATION OF DEBATE TECHNIQUE IN ENHANCING SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS' SPEAKING ABILITY AT DONG NAI TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY, VIETNAM

Speaking is considered the most important skill when learning English since it directly shows how students can utilize English in communication to meet the goal of English learning. There are a number of techniques that can assist students to enhance their speaking ability and the debate technique is one of the suitable methods of improving students' speaking ability. As a result, the researchers wanted to determine whether the debate technique can enhance the students' speaking skills and to examine the classroom circumstance when the debate technique is used in a speaking class. The participants of this study are 30 English-majored sophomores at Dong Nai Technology University. In conducting the study, the researchers used classroom action research (CAR) with the pre-test, post-test, observation and questionnaire in order to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique in teaching and learning speaking skills. The researchers used a t-test to analyze the score of the students' results in pre-test and post-test. There was a significant difference between the pre-test results and the post-test ones, the mean scores obtained by the students in the post-test (7.0250) were better than the mean scores of the students in the pre-test (5.5267). The data of the score of students' attitudes towards the debate technique through the questionnaire was a high category. It could be concluded that debate was an effective method to enhance students' speaking ability in teaching and learning English. Article visualizations