Speech Contest

Don and Rob were part of the judging panel for a speech contest last week. Twenty contestants, all non-English majors, spoke on one of two topics: volunteering and protecting the environment. Somehow, most of them managed to include "the Olympics" in their speeches. People here are very proud of the fact that the Olympics are in Beijing.

The speeches were only 3 minutes long but some were agonizing. No, the speeches themselves were ok but when a speaker would lose their place and struggled unsuccessfully to recall the rest of their speech, it was a long 3 minutes.

After surviving that portion, they then had to give an impromptu speech on a cartoon that was flashed up on a big screen. Sometimes, they had Chinese captions. Other times, they were just cartoons with a message. Many did a fine job trying to give some comment on the message that these conveyed. All I could think was that it would be difficult for us to get up there and give a 2 minute response to some never-seen-before image. Some of these students really struggled, mainly because they had a hard time coming up with the vocabulary to express their thoughts.

The last part of their speech involved Don or Rob asking them a question based on the cartoon. This was a bit challenging when the boys didn't understand the captions but they both did a great job coming up with a suitable question. Sometimes they really had to adjust the level of the question when it was obvious the speaker was really struggling with speaking English.

I even got a chance to present some awards even though I wasn't officially part of the panel. Guess a foreigner is a foreigner even if she does "look Chinese".

J