May 4th 2016 was a special day for the Luwan BC students. This was the first time we held an English Public Speaking competition. Mr. Milne and Mr. Berg chose the top 3 students from each grade to battle in the finals in front of the whole school. All the participants did a great job and showed their strong English skills.

Although I am a grade 12 student, I have to say that the students from grade 10 and grade 11 were the best, not only because of their passion, but also because of the interesting topics that they chose. For example, Jerry Liang, the winner of this competition spoke on the topic of “lies in our social media”, which is very close to our life and successfully attracted student attention. Moreover, the style of his speech was very unique. It was full of acting, stories and body language. When I asked him how he made his speech so special, he said: “I think a speech should be different from a presentation. You need to put your emotion into it.” In addition, through the whole speech Jerry was speaking fluently. He said his father helped him a lot on this part. He practiced at least 10 times with his father who gave him some useful suggestions.

We learned a lot of public speaking skills from this competition. More importantly, students from each grade now have more contact with one another. I hope there will be more English speech competitions in the future.