美的呈现：英文诗歌创作比赛01

        In order to inculcate the love of poem writing among students, promote creativity, resourcefulness, self-expression and promote universal values in a fun and creative way through the medium of poetry writing, the school has organized a poem writing competition. Students of all levels were encouraged to participate in this competition.

        Poetry is about self expressing, and this competition is a good opportunity for students to share their thoughts with others. Practice makes perfect. While students try to arrange their thoughts and convert them into poetry, their English skills improve. Before conducting this competition, ELC invited Prof. Malachi Edwin Vethamani and Dr. Too Wei Keong from the University of Nottingham to run a poetry writing workshop for both students and teachers. They gained a lot of knowledge and tips from the workshop.

        This is our first poem writing competition. Madam Boo, the head of ELC, expressed her vision on enhancing students’ level of English in the literature aspect. She hopes that the competition can bring impact to students and they can be more literary-cultured.

        Learning and mastering a language should not be limited to receiving knowledge. Using it and expressing yourself through it is an important part of learning. Poetry writing is a great medium to do so.

        Poetry writing can begin with people or objects in our surroundings. As Prof. Edwin mentioned during the workshop, beginners can start off with a theme that is related to their daily life. For example, one of the winners (Lee Yi Yang, J1 Dublin) expressed his love and appreciation towards his father in his poem, and another winner (Lim Yu Yan, J3 Washington) described her daily struggles and hopes.

        Since this competition was held during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has seemed to become a muse for students to develop their thoughts as quite a number of poetry pieces were related to it.

        Some students expressed their thoughts on how the pandemic has affected them, some participants used a creative way to grumble about his hair getting long because of the MCO’s restrictions caused by the pandemic. Some even shared their thoughts on the important events that occurred this year, such as the Australia’s bushfire, the locust plague, Black Lives Matter Movement and so on. We get to see that students are not only aware of their own surroundings, they also show their concern over current affairs happening all around the world. They demonstrated their work with deep emotions and creativity.

        Through this competition, we get to take a glimpse of students’ thoughts. At the same time, students are able to improve their literature cultivation, which is a win-win situation. Holding our first poem writing competition is a great start and hopefully we get to improve students’ English capability in different fields in the future.