A Case Study on the Development of Chinese EFL Debaters’ Argumentative Competence

Abstract

This study aims to explore and analyze the argumentative competence of Chinese debaters by observing the fallacies they made in one semester’s English debate course. The 8 rounds of debates are selected, of which three teams participated in 2 of the prepared debates and 2 fixed impromptu debates respectively. It is evident that of the five categories of fallacies, relevance-related, sufficiency-related and acceptability-related fallacies were the most common fallacies compared with structural-related fallacies and rebuttal-related fallacies. In prepared debate, the debaters’ argumentative skills in relevance, sufficiency, acceptability, structure, and rebuttal improved but in impromptu debate, this trend did not exist, revealing the debaters’ argumentative competence was unstable and varied from team to team.