English competitions --> dreams, innovation and er...dreams

English speaking competitions seem to be a regular occurance here on campus in China. The foreign teachers are always asked to be judges at these things, so i've already received two invitations for two different comps. The first one I had to cancel on cuz I had to sort out some visa issues, but the second one i managed to get along to today.

Like most things in China, organization seemed to be severely lacking! It seemed that everything was being made up on the fly or at the very last minute, and even then things were still being changed at the last minute. For example we were sent two sample videos of speaches and told the students were all going to reproduce these on stage. We were to prepare 5 questions based on the speach. In the end though, most of the students came along with their own speach prepared. It was also unclear whether we were to prepare questions purely based on testing their memory of the speach, or to test their wider understanding of the issue. All this of course was clarified 10 minutes before the start. We were also not given anything except a small slip of paper with the assessment criteria and their name, shortly before each speach.

Between the four of us foreign teachers we were originally assigned about 50 students each. That caused a bit of confusion, seeing we only had two hours and the speaches we were originally shown went for at least 4 minutes each. When quizzed about this, the admin's response was ''oh don't worry, each student will only speak for 1-2 minutes before being stopped''.
What?! So they're only delivering half the speach, and we've based some of our 5 questions on content in the later half of the speach. Whats the deal?

Fortunately though only about 26 students in total turned up. I guess alot of them got cold feet. I don't know how i would've handled sitting through 50 students listening to one of two possible speaches over and over again though. In response to that, the Chinese co-teachers who would be judging with us stressed that if we thought a speaker was no good, we could simply cut them off mid speach and send them packing. Like having some sort of big gong to stop the speach, hey hey it's saturday, red faces style. It seemed that that was a completely acceptable thing to do here in China, but the four of us westerners couldn't bring ourselves to do that.

But like i mentioned before, most of the students came prepared with their own speaches. Not like there was that much variety though. The theme they had based their

speach on was ' a word that has changed the world'. Between the 13 students Mike (the other foreign teacher) and I assessed, we heard at least three speaches on innovation, two speaches on dreams, and two on the strong influence of Chinese culture. I swear at least two of the innovation speaches were copied from a common source.

Seeing as this was a preliminary compeitition, the performances were not expected to be dazzling, but the standard was probably much lower than what I was expecting. In some cases, much, much lower. To the extent where I was struggling to even understand a word some were saying. For those speaches I was leaning over, hanging off every utterance coming out of their mouths, hoping to catch a keyword to give me a clue as to what exact topic they were talking about. All of this while smiling and nodding to the speaker like I knew exactly what he/she was on about. Although we weren't obliged to ask questions after every speach, I did feel there was a need to test their understanding of the topic and to be consistent with all the students. Half the time though, the response wouldn't directly answer my question, and in some cases the students would go off on a complete tangent and reiterate a point.

It was also pretty damn hard to come up with questions for some broad topics like 'love'. That one had me stumped, while Mike just asked the speaker how he could display his love/affection for a Chinese student (i assume in a non-kinky way). Mike, being a bit of a cynical bastard, also decided to drop a bombshell in the room and casually ask one of the students for her opinion on the Chinese governments censorship of the internet, after she'd given a speach on innovation. I really don't know if mike was just being a dumb shit, or if he was testing the waters, but at that point i could see the two other chinese co-teachers tense up before burying my own face into the desk. I thought to myself, now theres a quick deportation ticket back to oz.... Fortunately, either the student was either very wiley, or didn't understand the question at all, and just gave some very vague answer saying the government needs to tighten restrictions.....and exhale.

You could tell most of the students were pretty damn nervous, and i couldn't blame them. Even though some of them had pretty low levels of english (i know because some of them were from my classes), they still threw themselves into the competition. Surely they knew they wouldn't have a chance in hell to get through, so i think it was more for the experience. Good on em I say. So open expressions of being nervous, forgetting lines, prolonged pauses, restarts, and speed reciting were the norm. There was not much expression(facial or body), intonation or stress (something chinese find difficult to grasp), or eye contact either, and attire of suits and nice dresses seemed to be abandoned for shirts, tracky dacks and tracksuits. I didn't have the heart to write down scores like 2/20 for pronounciation or other marks on that scale, but at least I consistently gave higher marks to everyone. It was more like 10/20. And I had to keep reminding myself that my expectations and standards were probably set too high at this stage of competitions. Anyway, Mike and I did earmark two speakers who were the best of the lot, but at this stage probably not national winning material, or even province winning. But, who knows, with a bit of training and work they may go a long way.