About a Speech Contest

One of my students recently participated in Ibaraki city’s English speech contest, and Inari-san asked me to write about it, so I’ll do my best to share what I know about my student’s experience in getting ready for it.

The speech contest was open to junior and senior high school students. Anyone could join, but only one student in one school could participate. For junior high school students, like my student, they had to memorize and recite a story.

In September, my student took extra one-to-one lessons with me to prepare for the contest.

I was nervous because I didn’t (and still don’t 😆) think I’m qualified to advise anyone on how to give a speech. 😆 When I was in high school, I wrote and gave one or two speeches, but only for events and never for contests.

Luckily, my student is responsible, so he did what he needed to do to prepare for the contest, and he took the advice I gave to help him improve.

Finally on Sunday he gave his speech and he came in third out of 15 participants, which is impressive especially because he was the only first year student (all the others were third years). It must have been intimidating, but I’m sure he did his best and I hope it was an experience that he could learn a lot from.