静岡英和女学院 中学校・高等学校

This year’s English Speech and Recitation Contest for our high school students was held last week. Tomorrow we will be presenting awards to seven students: two winners in the short recitation category, three in the long, and two in the original speech section. I am looking forward to being in the audience and clapping for our winners as they really deserve the applause. They worked very hard both to memorize their speeches and to present them in an engaging way to the listeners, with gestures, eye contact, and a loud and clear voice. Congratulations!

Although only nineteen high school students participated in last week’s contest in the school’s chapel, all the first and second year students had taken part in mini-contests the week before in their homeroom English classes to select the final participants. They could choose freely between memorizing and reciting a short speech of approximately 130 words, a longer speech of 240 words, or their own original speech of 200 – 250 words.

The first short recitation choice was an excerpt of BTS’s speech to the United Nations in 2018 connected with Unicef’s ‘Love Myself’ campaign, a program which focused on the important issue of young people and mental health. The second choice was taken from Martin Luther King’s classic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech given in 1963 in Washington. Sadly, as we have seen in recent years, racial equality and justice have still not been achieved yet, so the message of this speech is still very important.

The long recitation choices were taken from addresses given by two strong female actors who have done a lot of work with the United Nations in recent years. The first was by Angelina Jolie who spoke about refugees in 2009 and the second by Emma Watson who talked about gender equality in 2014. As with racial justice, unfortunately gender discrimination is still an issue in our modern world and, with the invasion of Ukraine this past February, refugees have once again become horrific front-page news.

Two first-year and three second-year students chose to write their own speech about something that was of interest or of concern to them. The topics varied from thoughts about different styles of English in the world to serious topics such as the war in Ukraine and discrimination to comments on the importance of helping others and the underlying positive message of Doraemon. We were very glad to see that these students rose to the challenge of making their own speech and hope that even more students will attempt this next year.

Once again, congratulations to all our students who did their best in this year’s speech and recitation contest. We encourage all our students to set ambitious goals in this and other endeavours. “Aim high! You may not hit the target, but your arrow will fly far.”

Jean

On June 15th 2022, the annual Senior High English Speech and Recitation Contest was held at our school. The is the second in-school speech contest we have held this year, the first being the Junior High Recitation that was held in April.

In this contest, students were allowed to enter one of three groups. The first group of students read one of two short speeches by either Martin Luther King or the K-Pop group, BTS. These speeches were each about 100 words long. The second group of students could choose between a speech by Angelina Jolie about refugees or a speech by Emma Watson about gender equality. The final group was an original speech group. In this group, the students wrote their own speeches about a topic they are interested in.

Before the contest, each homeroom held a class contest and students were selected by Jean and I to take part. In total, six students were selected to read short speeches, five were selected to read long speeches and a further five were selected to read their original speeches. The level of the students’ speeches this year was very high and simply being selected to read onstage in the chapel should be considered a great achievement.

After listening to each of the speeches, the judges awarded prizes to the best two short speeches, the best three long speeches and the best two original speeches. In addition, the students who prizes in the long speech and original speech groups will be given the opportunity to represent our school at the Shizuoka Prefecture Central Speech Contest in September.

As always, judging this contest was very difficult because of the hard effort by all of the students. I was especially impressed by the five students who wrote their own speeches. Read speeches is very hard but writing your own is even harder. I would like everyone who wrote their own speech to know they did a great job.

I am looking forward to the prefectural speech contests in September and hope that the students who are selected to take part in those contests do their very best.

Stuart