Reported by ELC
The Forum Competition 2016 was successfully held at the YTL Hall on 5 April 2016. It was organised by the English Language Centre to promote the use of English, to encourage public speaking among students and to create students’ awareness on current and social issues.
With the objective of involving all the Senior students in the forum activity, it was made compulsory as one of their speaking
activities in class. The English teachers organised them into groups to research on the decided topics, conduct discussions, work on the scripts, practise and present during the Activity Lesson. The process took months to complete. The best teams were then shortlisted to participate in the selection round arranged from 28 March to 1 April 2016.
After a competitive preliminary round, nine teams were selected to enter the finals. With a short introduction by the emcees, the panelists took turns to share their points of view on a variety of topics including education, social issues and lifestyle. This year a Q & A session was included at the end of each discussion. Each team had to respond impromptu to one question posed by one of the judges after a brief discussion among themselves. It served as a good opportunity for them to demonstrate their critical thinking skills and fluency.
This year, we were honoured to have invited Mr Sri Kanda Raj, who was our school English debate trainer, to be our chief judge. Mr Sri has got a lot of experience in debate competitions, as a debater as well as an adjudicator, nationally and internationally. After a musical interlude presented by a group of students from J2 Washington, Mr Sri was invited to give some comments to the participants. He said that the judges had been impressed with the participants’ presentations as they all looked composed and confident. They had presented good content with solid evidence rather than assumptions. They were also able to respond to each other from different perspectives instead of just delivering their own speeches. However, the participants were reminded not to restrict themselves to their own scripts. Instead, they should be comfortable portraying themselves onstage. In brief, the judges were very proud of the students’ performance.