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Mastering English through Global Debate brings together rhetorical traditions and the best practices of ESL instruction to facilitate superior-level proficiency in the English language. Each chapter addresses a rich topic of debate, providing students with a set of prereading activities, texts covering both sides of a debate topic, and postreading comprehension and lexical development exercises—all of which foster the language and critical thinking skills needed for successful debates. A rhetorical methods section in each chapter integrates language and practice and prepares students for end-of-chapter debates. Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, in both synchronous online teaching and the individual classroom. Students are prepared to participate fully in debates with their classmates—at home, abroad, or both.

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

Mastering Russian through Global Debate brings together the rhetorical traditions of the communications field and the best practices of adult second-language instruction to facilitate Superior-level proficiency in the Russian language. Each chapter addresses a rich topic of debate, providing students with a set of prereading activities, texts covering both sides of a debate topic, and continues with postreading comprehension and lexical development exercises—all of which foster the language and critical thinking skills needed for successful debates. A rhetorical methods section in each chapter integrates language and practice and prepares students for end-of-chapter debates. Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, in both synchronous online teaching and the individual classroom. Students are prepared to participate fully in debates with their classmates—at home, abroad, or both.

Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, whether in synchronous online teaching or the individual classroom. Through debate, students learn how to make hypotheses, support their conclusions with evidence, and deploy the rhetoric of persuasion in the target language. Though this method provides an exciting pedagogy for moving students from the advanced to the superior level, there is a paucity of materials available for instructors who wish to plan a curriculum focused on debate. Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate: Theory and Practice provides teachers with both the theoretical underpinnings for using debate in the foreign language classroom as well as practical advice for developing reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills through debate. It discusses task-based language learning and helps instructors design debate-related tasks for the classroom.

Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate will be useful for any instructor working at the advanced level, and particularly for those training future language instructors. One of the new digital short publications available through Georgetown University Press, it is an ideal complement to the press’s new titles on mastering languages through global debate.

Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.

To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond: Theory and Methods for Developing Superior Second Language Ability addresses an important issue in Second Language Acquisition—how to help learners progress from Intermediate and Advanced proficiency to Superior and beyond. Due to the pressures of globalization, American society encounters an ever-increasing demand for speakers with advanced language abilities. This volume makes available cutting edge research on working memory and cognition and empirical studies of effective teaching. In addition it can serve as a practical handbook for seasoned and pre-professional instructors alike. The bringing together of the latest in second language acquisition theory, decades of empirical research, and practical classroom application makes for an unprecedented volume examining the achievement of Superior-level foreign language proficiency.