Academic policy debate is a competition in which two opposing teams(affirmative and negative ones) make speeches to support their arguments on a resolution and disagree with those of the other team. Thus, policy debate requires multiple levels of comm...
Academic policy debate is a competition in which two opposing teams(affirmative and negative ones) make speeches to support their arguments on a resolution and disagree with those of the other team. Thus, policy debate requires multiple levels of communicative competence such as ability to collect and organize ideas, ability to subordinate ideas, ability to evaluate evidence, ability to see logical connections, ability to think and speak in outline terms, ability to speak convincingly, ability to adapt, etc. Through the contemporary literature review on the debate and argumentation theories, this study aims at the theoretical constructs of the debate competence and the evaluation models of the performance of academic policy debate. The conceptual design of an individual`s debate competence in this study not only provides the performance evaluation model for academic debate but also some directions for developing the debate education and training courses at the college and university levels.