Speech Contest

      I took a paid leave to see my students give their speech in a local speech contest. One of them were who I had been in charge of, in terms of improvement of his speech. Compared with his previous speech one year ago, he did much better! His pronunciation became greater than last year because he corrected his intonation and accent. Since his topic was socially interesting one,  I hoped he would get some special prize, but he didn't. Though I was a bit disappointed, I'm sure he did his very best. The judge commented at the closing address that speech is scary thing even for American. I thought it was not so for them, so I was a bit surprised at the fact. He also said that he is proud of participants because they did in their second language. I thought so too. All participants surely became more confident in using their own English.

     I remembered I also took part in a speech contest when I was in junior high school. I could be motivated to speak English from that kind of experiences. I want to appreciate the teacher who taught me how to speak English. Using English is fun. Communicating with L2 is intriguing phenomena. I hope he is more motivated to use English and keep learning it through his life.