Our school has successfully held two chitchat competitions. The competition made every student and teacher an active participant in their language learning using the house team system.
The purpose of the Chitchat competition is to encourage students to speak English at school. Basically, if you speak Chinese you will lose a card and your team will lose a point. At the end of the competition, the team with the most points wins a pizza party. At the beginning of the competition, students’ cards were taken by the teachers almost every class. It’s not because the students rejected speaking English, it’s because Chinese is our first language, so we have a certain inertia towards speaking Chinese. As the time went on, the number of students who spoke Chinese decreased. The competition made us realize that we are in a Canadian school and it should be normal to speak English. Another benefit the competition brought is the improvement of our speaking skills. Students in our school became much more comfortable speaking English. All of us are still English learners. It is understandable that people do not want to speak English because they are afraid of making mistakes. But when you are given a language environment, it is much easier to speak out. You find other people also make mistakes, and you can learn from the others’ mistakes and improve.
However, after the competition finished, students are back to the old status. Chinese still dominates the conversation between students. The competition has proven itself useful. Maybe what we need is to do the competition all year round.