Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Annual Speech Contest
This coming Friday we'll hold our annual speech contest. As veterans know, its a chance to meet classmates and faculty, and hear some Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. We've been doing this for upwards of fifteen years now, but to be honest I haven't heard much feedback from students. This might just be a function of me not teaching a 100-300 level language class. Or, it might be that there just isn't that much feedback to be had. I'm curious to know the case, regardless. Comment, please, on what you think of speech contests in general and/or ours in particular.
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2 comments:
I had a lot of fun at the speech contests in 07 and 08. As a Japanese language student, I had little contact with students taking Chinese and Korean, so it was really cool to get to mingle with them for the evening. And as always, it's great to see the EAS faculty having a good time with us students and each other. (That's not brown nosing! You're a funny bunch!)
The only two problems I've seen are:
A) The room is a little too small.
B) This is more of a question than a problem, but do the judges take first language background into account? For example, the Korean students in my Japanese classes pretty much napped through it and got As because Korean and Japanese are so similar. Something similar at the 2007 speaking contest, where a Korean girl competing in the Japanese 100 level delivered a 5 minute narrative that could have given the 200 level participants a run for their money. (That said, she definitely earned the win, as her competitor's speech was particularly bad. Wink, wink.)
I'm not saying the department should bar foreign students from participating by any means - they're just as much a part of the community as the American students are. I'm just curious about how the participants are judged, and if the judges adhere to a "colorblind" policy.
That said, I'm looking forward to the 2009 competition, and hope to see both American and foreign students represented.
I've been putting off answering this, because it isn't really clear. We don't give the judges ANY guidelines...we just let them do what they do. Our criteria for the judges is that they can't have a conflict of interest (i.e., they can't be your teachers), but otherwise each year it is a mix of old and new folks.
The room, you're right, is too small. But there's nothing better in the Humanities building, and getting other spaces is a bother. This year, for some reason, the turn-out was a little less, so most people had a seat. I hope that's not a trend...
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