TEACHING DEBATE IN FRENCH TO TECHNICAL SPECIALITIES STUDENTS

Abstract

The article deals with the question of teaching debate in French to technical specialities students. The concept of the debate as one of the modern forms of discussion, its characteristics and importance for the effective formation of oral production competence and future careers have been specified. The author defines the prerequisites, basic levels which have an influence on mastering of the art of scientific argumentation and debate in French: extralinguistic, linguistic, discourse and cultural communication levels. Three fundamental stages in debating and their characteristics have been determined: initial stage which is important for the identification of participants in the debate, announcing the topic of future discussion and objectives, arguments and counterarguments developing stage and final stage. Some argumentative strategies that future engineers have to learn in order to master their skills of debating have been described: concession, confrontation demonstration, accession strategy, critical review and refutation strategies. The article offers some elaborated exercises for forming professionally-oriented French debating and communicative competence where all the aforementioned peculiarities of debate resulting from different factors have been reflected. So, teaching debate to future engineers is very important for achieving communicative competence in view of the fact that the teacher can prepare students to face real-life conversation in various situation and context. This is a language activity based on argumentation which includes the arts and sciences of debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion.