Enhancing University Students’ Speaking Skills Through Debate-Based Instruction: A Classroom Action Research Study

Abstract

The study aims to explore the effectiveness of debate activities as an instructional method for improving the speaking competencies of non-English major students in a Vietnamese university context, addressing the gap in process-oriented research on debate-based instruction in Vietnamese tertiary EFL contexts. The study employed the Classroom Action Research (CAR) design with 20 first-year students across two instructional cycles. The class observation and speaking performance test with an analytical rubric collected the data. The students’ speaking performances increased from Cycle I (mean score = 65.5) to Cycle II (mean score = 74.45). Improvements related to better engagement in class activities, learner confidence and peer interactions. These findings suggest that, from an SLA perspective, debate activities enhance interaction by enabling learners to negotiate meaning and co-construct language during communicative exchanges. However, improvements in grammatical accuracy and vocabulary range were more limited. The findings indicate a 13.7% improvement in speaking performance, highlighting the pedagogical value of debate in enhancing communicative competence in EFL contexts.