May 24. It was during class hour in the afternoon, 9 speakers and 5 judges were the main participants of this small but special English speech competition. It was a competition organized by an independent student English society, which had more than a hundred student members. One of the organizers Terry said that the purpose of the competition is to give an opportunity for their schoolmates to feel the magic of English.
There were three parts in the competition: prepared speech with no topic limit, impromptu speech with given topics, and question answering. Besides the top three winners, the competition also selected winners for the prizes of the Best Elegant Demeanor, the Best Expressive Ability and the Best Personality Present. Richard Li was the winner of the First Prize. “It’s good for the students to get some recognition. Some of them are really trying hard to learn.” Vicki said.
Regarding the performance of the students in the competition, Terry said he could see quite satisfactory results. One of the judges Vicki said, giving the fact that it’s pretty scary for students to make a public speech, their performance was quite good. However, when asked about her expectation for the students in their future improvement, Vicki said that the topics students chosen for their prepared speech were too general, leaving the speech itself with too much emotion and too few facts. She suggested the students to do more research on their topics before making the speech.
Terry said their society will continue to organize more English events, “The learning atmosphere in our campus is not strong enough. We will try to have more English events to attract more participation of our schoolmates.” Vicki also said that they are discussing the feasibility of having the Wednesday afternoon free of class the next semester, so that students and teachers can have more time to participate in other activities. She also said she would like to organize students to take part in some formal speech contest like the CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest.
Christy Zhao\DPRO
