This study aims to identify the characteristics of summaries written in English by Japanese senior high school students after listening to a constructive speech in English. Their summary writings were compared with those summaries written after reading the same speech script by another group of Japanese high school students. The results indicated that students who listened to the speech were as capable of grasping the contents of the speech as those who read the script, supposedly thanks to their understanding of the debate speech format. Although the listening group’s summaries contained grammatical errors more frequently, less frequently did they borrow the expressions directly from the original text than the other reading group did. These findings suggest that the summary writing activity after listening to debate speeches could provide learners with opportunities to practice summarizing as well as paraphrasing skills with additional feedback on their grammar errors.

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The main focus of legal argumentation entails a two-step process: (1) interpreting the meaning of statutory texts and (2) applying the interpretation to specific factual circumstances to derive conclusions. Considering the distinctions between legal argumentation, which encompasses these characteristics, and argumentation in “Policy Debate” that predominantly revolves around evaluating pros and cons of the given proposition, the authors conducted a seminar-style course “Legal Argumentation Debate” at their university. This paper presents an account of the course's practice and explores the significance and challenges associated with utilizing the debate format to help students acquire the skills of legal argumentation.

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Competitive debate consists of two major participants, debaters and judges. Although much of the previous research has focused on the educational effects of debating, the aspect of judging and its evaluation remains sparsely studied. Ulrich (1986) is a major textbook of judging for students and educators. This article explored the possibilities of introducing a judge evaluation system in Japanese debating circuit, where judge evaluation system has not been popularly adopted. At major national tournaments in Japan, feedback sheets, collected from debaters following the judges’ oral feedback, were examined. The analysis showed that debaters were able to evaluate judges appropriately regardless of their debate experience. Further, the content of the oral feedback that received high or low scores was also analyzed to identify the characteristics of convincing oral feedback. The findings suggest that broad implementation of a judge evaluation system is highly desirable and feasible in Japan. In addition, revealing the criteria for convincing oral feedback could further contribute to future argumentation education and research on judge training and mutual evaluation.

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