This document proposes integrating debate into the English curriculum at a Colombian high school. It suggests piloting debate classes for 8th and 9th grade students using one of their weekly English hours. The proposal would use a "mid-CLIL" approach of partially immersing students in English for debate instruction and practice. It aims to enhance students' English skills through critical thinking opportunities, language input/output, and motivation. The proposal details how classes would cover debate structure, arguments, and practice debates. Student progress would be assessed through debate grades and comparisons to results from other English assessments.

1. CURRICULUM PROPOSAL:
INTEGRATING “DEBATE” INTO THE ENGLISH AREA
By:
Claudia Marcela Suescún Giraldo
High School Teacher
Colegio Colombo Británico
Presented to:
Mr. Vladimir Zapata Villegas
School principal
Colegio Colombo Británico
Mr. David Irwin
Head of the English area
Colegio Colombo Británico
Date:
December 6.
Envigado, Antioquia
2010.

2. INTRODUCTION
The world of education is changing by the minute, specially the one of foreign
language education. Everyday new challenges as well as opportunities are arising
for both teachers and institutions in order to improve this fundamental process of
preparing the future citizens of the world.
In foreign language teaching in particular, we have nowadays an approach that has
been applied successfully in schools around the world: a methodology called CLIL
(Content and Language Integrated Learning).
CLIL has been defined by David Marsh as “situations where subjects, or parts of
subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely
the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language".
(Marsh, D. 2002. Content and Language Integrated Learning: The European
Dimension – Actions, Trends and Foresight Potential).
This approach gives us the opportunity of enhancing our students’ foreign
language learning due to the fact that it:
• Promotes critical thinking and gives more opportunities to have oral
production activities.
• Provides a higher amount of language input.
• Increasing meaningfulness of language content.
• Motivates the process of meaning negotiation.
• Reduces stress related to certain language units (past perfect progressive
for example)
• Allows students to explore more vocabulary.

3. PROPOSAL BACKGROUND
Our school has already given some steps in the implementation of CLIL into our
curriculum, particularly in the English area with:
• Content based learning in primary and high school textbooks.
• Ethics from 4th to 6th grade in English.
• Artistic education in English in preschool and primary.
So the implementation of this proposal would not be something new, but another
step towards the school’s aim of becoming bilingual.
PROPOSAL:
To implement a Debate class in 8th and 9th grade, through the study of pilot
groups during the academic year of 2011 and contrasting their results with the
other groups. If this trial is successful, the course could be integrated definitely into
our curriculum starting in 2012.
By definition there are three types of CLIL:
• Soft CLIL: the topic is a part of the language ELT course curriculum
(Language led course)
• Hard CLIL: the way some schools teach half of the curriculum immersed in a
target language (Content led).
• Mid CLIL: some schools teach some CLIL modules, where a subject is
taught for a limited (for ex. 20) amount of hours (Partial immersion).
So in this proposal we would have a form of Mid CLIL, as we would be using one of
the 10 hours that 8th graders have in English (or 9 hours in the case of 9th grade).

4. PROPOSAL DETAILS
Use 1 hour a week with the whole group to work on a program that would include:
• Consults in the library or computers room.
• Instruction related to the structure of a debate and its conditions.
• Instruction regarding how to support an argument and how to reject it.
• Practice on oral debates, both in teams and individually.
PROPOSAL ASSESSMENT
In order to assess the effectiveness of this proposal and include it in the evaluation
of the English area we would implement the following strategies:
• A grade in the final English assessment each bimester.
• In order to compare the results with other groups we have the results in oral
performance as well as the Bimestrial English Test and the Oxford Online
Test.