Speech Contest
Today we had the speech contest for our class to decide who would appear in the school’s speech competition. My speech was about my experiences teaching in a Japanese high school. I had practised the night before, but wasn’t feeling confident as I had rewritten and added some parts and my tutor only checked it this morning. We drew lots to decided the order we would go in (I was second) and then given ten minutes for a final practice. Apart from our tutor another one of our teachers who normally has the day off came to listen, as she really wanted to hear our speeches.
My speech went okay, though I was pretty nervous. I felt I didn’t show enough emotion and stood there rigidly. I wanted the speech to be light-hearted, but I think it came across as very serious. However, I didn’t make any big mistakes and my tutor gave me positive feedback saying my speech was well written and delivered and my intonation had really improved. The one big criticism she gave was that when I used some Japanese foreign loan words (for example, member and friendly) I pronounced them like English words. I thought everyone in the class gave good speeches, though I was surprised the Korean guy’s one wasn’t better. His content was very good (about the differences between Korea and Japan), but he obviously hadn’t practiced much.
Though my speech went fairly well fortunately I wasn’t in the top three. We then had to vote again between the Brazilian guy, the guy from Taiwan and the Singaporean girl. After our tutor counted the votes written on paper there was a tie between the Taiwanese guy and Singaporean girl and so we had another vote (this time by raising our hands while not looking). The Singaporean girl was chosen, but she really didn’t want to appear at the speech competition despite our tutor trying to persuade her. After protesting strongly for a while our tutor asked if anyone would like to enter. In the end the Brazilian guy agreed to represent our class. Our tutor’s going to help him prepare and I think his speech on anime and his experiences after coming to Japan will go down well. I’m just glad it won’t be me!
My speech went okay, though I was pretty nervous. I felt I didn’t show enough emotion and stood there rigidly. I wanted the speech to be light-hearted, but I think it came across as very serious. However, I didn’t make any big mistakes and my tutor gave me positive feedback saying my speech was well written and delivered and my intonation had really improved. The one big criticism she gave was that when I used some Japanese foreign loan words (for example, member and friendly) I pronounced them like English words. I thought everyone in the class gave good speeches, though I was surprised the Korean guy’s one wasn’t better. His content was very good (about the differences between Korea and Japan), but he obviously hadn’t practiced much.
Though my speech went fairly well fortunately I wasn’t in the top three. We then had to vote again between the Brazilian guy, the guy from Taiwan and the Singaporean girl. After our tutor counted the votes written on paper there was a tie between the Taiwanese guy and Singaporean girl and so we had another vote (this time by raising our hands while not looking). The Singaporean girl was chosen, but she really didn’t want to appear at the speech competition despite our tutor trying to persuade her. After protesting strongly for a while our tutor asked if anyone would like to enter. In the end the Brazilian guy agreed to represent our class. Our tutor’s going to help him prepare and I think his speech on anime and his experiences after coming to Japan will go down well. I’m just glad it won’t be me!