Forum Competition

       

     Reported by ELC

      The annual Forum Competition for Senior classes was successfully held at the YTL Hall on 25 April 2017. 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. 

       Forum is one of the speaking activities that involves all the Senior students. The  English teachers organise their students into groups to analyze certain topics, conduct discussions, write scripts and present during the activity lesson. It usually takes 2-3 months to prepare and present the topic chosen. The seniors had the preliminary round on 17 April 2017 and only three best teams from each Senior level were shortlisted to present in the finals. 

   

   During the finals, nine teams presented various interesting and realistic everyday topics ranging from K-Pop Culture to modern theories discussing Artificial Intelligence. At the end of each presentation, the panelists had to respond impromptu to one question posed by the judges. Besides testing the in-depth knowledge of topics presented, this Q & A session also served as a good opportunity for participants to demonstrate their critical thinking skills and fluency.

       This year, we were honoured to have two external judges, Mr Muqriz, the chief judge, who is currently the trainer for the English Debate Club at school and his counterpart, Mr Muhammad Azim. Mr Muqriz has got a lot of experience in debate competitions, as a debater as well as an adjudicator, nationally and internationally. 

       While the judges took time to finalize the scores, the audience were entertained with one of the song performances recorded during the Song Fest Competition held for Junior classes two weeks before. Mr Muqriz applauded the participants for boldly choosing challenging topics that needed much reading and research. He also added that some topics had emotional outreach and advised participants not to be too indulged in emotions when presenting. Although, the overall presentations seemed impressive, he commented that some sounded scripted and not natural. Therefore, he advised the participants to include good conversational tone when discussing and having effective eye contact not only with the audience but with the panelists in their group. Lastly, he advised participants to practise applying the right social cues when presenting.

First Prize

S3 Canberra 

It was indeed a pleasant surprise to win the Champion title at the Forum competition this year. We never even dreamt of this as we initially took part just to get some experience since it was our last year at Hin Hua High School. We did work hard as a team and  tried our level best to cooperate with one another in order to give the best performance in the finals. At the same time we also appreciate our English teacher Ms. Malini’s guidance and feedback during our practices. Thank you to the English Language Centre for giving us such a memorable opportunity in our final year.

Best Speaker

Hing Mok Juin (S3 Washington) 

I am really surprised having won the Best Speaker award and also the Second prize in the Forum Competition this year. My team and I tried our best and I take this opportunity to thank my team members and Ms Evon for our success. I have learnt a lot by participating in this competition, in particular about intonation, style and social cues when presenting. In my opinion, I have benefitted hugely by having been given this opportunity to participate in the Forum Competition this year.