Political debates as a teaching tool in other contexts

At polytechnical universities where our different subjects are offered, analysis of documents related to political discourse is far from frequent. However, this kind of documents may provide valuable information that can be used in Social Science subjects as well as in the teaching of foreign languages at a technical university. In recent years, we have used different political programmes and transcripted debates in order to apply content analysis like an objective tool to search and gather information. Also, we have used content analysis to explore the deployment of linguistic and rhetorical patterns that allow language learners to deal with some key pragmatic skills within a foreign language teaching environment. In this case, we analyse the debates of the last Presidential Elections in the United States of America and their use in the subject Research Methodologies and we compare it with other activities of the subject English for Specific Purposes. With a proper design of the session, we can work on the specific competence of each subject to guide students to apply content analysis to meet their objectives around a hot topic of discussion today.