Which Team (Sy, Alan, Elsie and Kelly) is the negative side about having a girlfriend of boyfriend in school while Not This Team (Leon, Jenny and Sue) is supporting the affirmative side.

The strongest point Which Team mentioned is that students still cannot control themselves very well since they are still adolescence. They may do something really bad and harmful to their boyfriend or girlfriend if they had one. Just as Sy said, they may have sex and teenagers are not allowed to do so. In brief, they wanted to convince people that having a boyfriend of a girlfriend would distract our conscious.

From Not This Team, they thought that having a boyfriend or a girlfriend is having a good partner analogously for study and many other aspects in their daily life. They wanted to prove that having a boyfriend or girlfriend will help people to study better and live better eventually.

The topic between Anonymous Team (Gene, Hugo and Yuki) and Michael Jackson Team (Michael, Judith and Grace) is should ESL students only speak English in school. Anonymous Team highly disagreed with this topic as they think speaking only English won’t have very much advantage because that it’s harder to understand in English than in Chinese. Also, using Chinese seldom to explain some big words can help people understand better and save more time.

 Michael Jackson Team really agreed with the topic. Since Chinese people began to speak Chinese in their childhood, they showed us that a language environment is a very important part of learning a whole new language. And only using English can provide us the language environment and help us boost our English level. The example they used is that the reason why we are now able to debate in English is that we all speak English in school these days.

As far as I concerned, debate is a type of discussion and communication. Debating is really a good opportunity to exchange everyone’s idea, thoughts, and perspectives with each other. From the debates, I learned more about my fellow classmates opinions of some tricky questions and impressible issues that actually exist in the society nowadays. Since I have known about my classmates’ thoughts, I can know how to get alone better with them. From that, I can say that debates are also a method to develop our precious friendship.

The debate topic I had last class is ‘Should Homosexual be allowed to marry in China?’ I’m on the negative side. Although we lost our battle, we still have strong arguments. For instance, Chinese culture won’t let the homosexual become legal and there will be a problem of ageing society if homosexual married without having any baby.

In brief, debate is really interesting and also makes me feel excited!

How well do you that you performed in the speech? How can you improve?

I think I did well. My topic met almost everyone’s favor and I think it’s really an appropriate topic. It can help me to persuade my audience easier.

I have all logos, pathos, ethos in my speech and according to the audience, it really affect them.

But Mr. Manno told me that I could still improve my pathos. In my speech I have my frustrated experience with the Internet as my pathos. And pathos is the emotion thing. But I didn’t show my emotion very much. I need to act more apparently so that my emotion will influence my audience. That’s one part I can improve.

The second one is about my intonation. I think I speak too fast to let everyone follow my words. This makes no help to persuade my audience but only let people feel confused about what I’m saying. This situation also happened in my previous speech. So it’s a really serious problem waiting to be solved.

In brief, speak slowly! Speak clearly! Use emotion to influence the audience! If I can make that come true, my speech will be better!

What did you like/dislike about the ‘speech’ unit and why?

I like to learn about how to use logos, and ethos. Especially the logos part, because I really like data, statistics, evidence and facts. I LOVE that sort of things. I feel really delighted when I speak out those things. People cannot be against to the reality! Actions speak louder than words! Ethos is also another good part. People cannot refuse to accept their own background information. Using their background to let them be convinced and make their ideology change is a good method in a persuasive speech.

The aspect, which I dislike, is pathos. I know that pathos is also the main way to convince my audience. Moreover, according to Mr. Manno’s suggestion, I should be more emotional when I was doing my persuasive speech. Apparently, I wanted to and I’ve planned about how should I act on the stage. But when I actually standing on the stage, I failed.  I’m not a good actress. I really cannot act! I feel so hard to express my emotions. I cannot act out what I feel naturally. It’s so weird to act exaggeratedly for me. I really want to be a good actress though.