Background: The skills in effective communication and critical thinking are essential for nurses to apply appropriate judgments in the delivery of patient care. Classroom debates are evident to be an effective strategy that can be used to improve such skills. Unfortunately, research focusing on classroom debates to promote critical thinking and oral communication skills among nursing students has not been extensively explored.   Purpose: This study aimed to explore nursing students’ views of classroom debates as a learning strategy to enhance critical thinking and oral communication skills.Methods: A descriptive qualitative research design was employed in this study. Twelve students of the undergraduate program in nursing with classroom debate experiences and willingness to participate were purposively recruited for semi-structured interviews. Open-ended questions were used, and probing questions were also generated from the participants to get more detailed information. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using the inductive content analysis. Results: The results of the study identified five themes, including the acquisition of new knowledge, awareness and responsiveness to diverse viewpoints and arguments, learning structuring ideas and appropriate ways of presentation, development of other necessary skills, and challenges of classroom debates in nursing education.  Conclusion: Classroom debates promoted the development of critical thinking and oral communication skills, and offered students an opportunity to develop other necessary skills in the face of today’s complex healthcare. Classroom debates can be integrated into the curriculum and teaching practices of any nursing educational institutions.

This study aimed to evaluate the demonstration of linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural dimensions of academic literacy in the written texts produced by the students of the nursing program. A descriptive qualitative research design was used to meet the purpose of the study. Data were collected from the students’ written texts, which served as the students’ responses to an English quiz. Fifteen out of fifty-two students’ written texts were randomly selected for the analysis. A modified scale table from the existing literature was used as a guideline during the analysis. This scale describes an assessment of the three dimensions of literacy: linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural. The results of the analysis showed that, in general, the students had a fair level of linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural dimensions of literacy. They could partially use layouts, punctuations, capitalizations, verb conjugations, and agreement as well as spelling. They also seemed to be familiar with some types of texts and generic structures, as well as linguistic features. However, there was evidence that students provided a less complete response and sometimes irrelevant information as well as an inconsistent interpretation of the subject of the text. This study indicates a high need for nursing students to improve their ability in academic literacy in English. As academic literacy is not a natural phenomenon, instead a learned ability, it should be developed and fostered in the educational institutions.