Today some of the kids were participating in an English speaking contest. They could talk about any subject they wanted and they would be judged on their confidence, pronuncination and internation and content. There was one kid from the 4th grade, four from the 5th grade and four from the 6th grade. The ability of the kids varied. Some of them were very confident, but their pronunciation was not very good and others had great content. I was acting as one of four judges, although as it turns out my votes carried much more weight than the others.
All of the kids had a good stab at it, but there were clearly some better than others. One kid was basically reading out Korean that had been written to sound like English, but it made the speech sound pretty awful. Another chose to retell a story and a further kid chose a controversial subject regarding an island in dispute between Korea and Japan. Unfortunately the speech regarding the island was clearly the work of his parents and it was rather fanatical if not quite a bit racist against Japan. Of course that is not an issue here in Korea, but I was not in favour of it at all, and so he lost some marks in content from me, yet he would not have won anyway due to his pronunciation.
In the end we came to a decision about who had won and who would be the runners up, the 4th grade student would get a special commendation for having a go. The prizes are simply certificates, although I can see that this may be something to use and look back on I decided that I wanted to reward all those that participated and hopefully not deter them from having a go again at another time. So tonight I have baked a batch of cookies that I will distribute to the competitors. Hopefully it will be a nice treat and likely cause a little jealousy from those kids that could have participated, but chose not to.
Rigth I'm off to bed, wonder when I'll add another post...
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