On the 4th of September,
2012, I participated in a speech coir contest organized by the Self-Access
Learning Center of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Prince of Songkla University,
Hatyai Campus, Thailand. It was held at one of the auditoriums of the Faculty
of Liberal Arts with the participation of students, guests and teachers from the
schools in Hatyai city. I had to be one of the judges in the contest which was
participated by nine schools, including the faculty of Liberal Arts.
The theme of the contest was “The World
We live in” which I found to be impressive and timely since we live in a world
where various activities of human beings have become the major cause of environmental
destruction and pollution. Performances of the eight schools were quite inspiring
in that all teams except one or two seemed to have exerted a lot of efforts to
communicate their message to the audience effectively. However, as is often the
case with Thai learners, the aspect of pronunciation posed problems for some
teams which impacted negatively on scoring high marks for their teams.
The team represented the Faculty of
Liberal Arts was the winner of the contest and their performance in all aspects
in line with the criteria used for rating, was quite excellent and moving because
they were able to use their body language, voice quality, costumes, and stage
lightings to communicate their message creatively and effectively to the
audience.
Making the welcome speech, Mr. Shimray,
one of the lecturers from the Department of Languages and Linguistics,
highlighted the objectives of organizing and conducting the speech coir
contest. He, moreover, stressed that students not only would receive an opportunity
to showcase their talents in the contest but also it would help learners
enhance their oral proficiency in the target language. This view, I suppose, is
very important and relevant to the context of Thai learners since they should
have a good command of English in order to achieve their personal goals as well
as national goals of the country.
Since the contest described above was
organized by the Self-Access Learning Center of the Faculty of Liberal Arts,
PSU, I wish to record here my sincere thanks for the officer in charge of it
and the organizing committee of the event for giving me an opportunity to
participate in it with a sense of zest.
Following are some of the pictures taken
by Aj Shimray while the event was in progress.
Three judges, Aj David, Aj (Thai lecturer) amd me
