The starts by a dictogloss activity. I will read a small part of a real news article available at https://breakingnewsenglish.com/2101/210102-online-learning-5.html The article is about online learning in Malaysia so it lends itself well to the debate. Students are instructed that they will listen to a short paragraph about online learning 3 times. In the first time, each student should only listen attentively without taking notes. In the second time, they are asked to take noted. In the third time, students work in groups to reconstruct the passage. Finally, I will project the article on the smart board for the students to compare between what they wrote and the original.

At this stage, students will read silently the whole article, and I will ask them to guess the meaning of these words: competence, initiative, underprivileged, and enhance. By using pictures, I will elicit from students the meaning of each word. enhance: https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/marketing-automation-2/the-cloud-and-cpq-driving-growth-in-more-ways-than-one/ Question: Is this person improving? competence: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dimensions-of-competence_fig4_329811263 Question: If these what you need to achieve competence, what does the word mean? underprivileged: https://danneiditch.org/why-we-should-care-about-underprivileged-children/ Question: what is the opposite of underprivileged? Initiative: https://exclusivecorporateimage.com/seeing-taking-initiative/ Question: Was the boy the first or last one to move?

Students will watch parts of a video featuring a class debate to point their attention to word stress, intonation, body language, eye contact, and the use of facts to support an argument. They are asked to take notes on the persuasive techniques used by the debtors. I will play the video from 1:40- 3:40 for the proponents' view and from 5:20-7:20 for the opponents' view. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sRaVkb2IaQ

The purpose of this stage is to review essential topics taught in previous lessons. First, students will revise the difference between strong and weak reasons when writing arguments. They will work in pairs to complete Testing Your Reasons worksheet (appendix 1). Second, I will elicit from them the main components of a persuasive essay and I will choose students randomly to provide the class with examples (appendix 2). Third, I will elicit from students some of the persuasive writing techniques using flash cards (appendix 3). In pairs, they will come up with sentences using at least three of the persuasive techniques.

Students were are asked to find one to two articles about distance learning and to highlight in yellow the advantages and in green the disadvantages. In addition, they were asked to fill in a T-chart (appendix ) to facilitate group discussions on the day of the debate. The class will be divided into 2 groups: proponents and opponents regardless of students' real stance. Each group has 8 students seated in 2 rows opposite to each other. To facilitate discussions, students from the proponents side will first discuss in pairs the four most important advantages of distance learning using the articles they read at home and the article used in dictogloss game in the warmer. They will use the notes organizer sheet (appendix ) to record the most important ideas they agreed on as well as the potential opponents' views to get ready to refute their claims ( 5 minutes). Then each pair will group up with another pair to compare their notes and decide on the most important advantages (3 minutes). Finally, all students from each side will group up to discuss the most important points. This grouping strategy can be found on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCDePzmP-B8&t=1s Debate Procedure (adapted form https://betterlesson.com/strategy/426) Debate Procedure: 1. Proposition Side Presents Their Viewpoint (5 minutes) Remind the other side must be taking notes to prepare counterarguments. 2. Opposition Side Presents Their Viewpoint (5 minutes) Remind the proposition side takes notes to prepare rebuttal. 3. Break (3 minutes) Both sides review the other side's claims to prepare rebuttal. 4. Proposition Side Presents Rebuttal (2 minutes) 5. Opposition Side Presents Rebuttal (2 minutes) 6. Proposition Closing Argument (1 minute) 7. Opposition Closing Argument (1 minute) At the end, to know which side had more convincing arguments, I take votes.

I will go round the class to monitor if students are using persuasive language and are all on task. I will not correct students during debate as I am targeting fluency in this activity. I will take notes of any grammatical and pronunciation errors to highlight them in a following class.