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confront similar and different challenges and gain growth during the participation.
Hence, these two students were recruited in this study.
Jean was born in the US and brought to Taiwan when she was four years old.
Her language proficiency is above-average, based on her previous TOEIC score, 580.
She was the first grader in the senior high school and studied in a regular class. She had no overseas experience after the age of nine, so she went to the Group A in the intra-school contest. Her proficiency was above-intermediate but easily felt uneasy when speaking English.
Vincent had studied in Shanghai American School from elementary school to junior high, and hence for him, English is a common language to communicate with others. Due to his years of overseas experience, he is categorized into group B which belongs to those who have stayed in English-speaking countries or American schools for more than two years after the age of nine. Also, his TOEIC scored above 975 and his high-intermediate level in GEPT passed, both of which serve as his evidence for his excellent language proficiency.
3.4 Instruction
3.4.1 Ashley’s Instruction
In the part of introducing Ashley’s instruction, I would firstly clarify how they were chosen as the contestants of the intra-school speech contest, and next I would briefly illustrate the general procedure of Ashley’s training in terms of the preparation for intra-school contest. Finally, I would explain how Ashley arranged trainings for Vincent for Taipei City English Speech Contest.
3.4.2 The Selections of Contestants
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This section presents how Ashley selected the contestants from her classes. In the first place, Ashley would like to invite whoever was willing to participate in the contest; however, nobody was voluntary to do so in every class she taught, so Ashley separated the class into different groups for students to act out the play from one of the lessons in the textbook. Based on the verbal performances, she chose the ones with good pronunciation and intonation.
Ashley had two classes of the10th grader. One is the regular class, and the other is the advanced class. For the regular class, due to the disparity of proficiency level, Jean’s performance easily stood out from the others and was chosen to be the participant of the speech contest.
On the other hand, in terms of the advanced class, owing to the general better expertise in English, Ashley even had to request the possible candidates to her office to have another round of selection. To decide whose capacity was better within the shortest time, she directly gave them the same task in the contest –– to improvise a story based on one picture alone. Finally, Vincent’s general performance made him the final contender for the contest.
As for Vincent’s excellence in English, I still remembered the first time how Ashley described Vincent. She said that she has a student from Shanghai speaking incredibly-good English, and his word choice was so amazingly accurate that the narrative of his story was fairly vivid. In brief, it was his vibrant and native-like speaking style that made him pop out from other peers in advanced class.
3.4.3Training Process for the Intra-school Contest
To have students better prepare for the intra-school contest, Ashley’s general training process was to give students ten minutes or so, ask them to come back to the
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office after that, and deliver the speech in front of her and other peers. Then, she would provide the individual feedback after each student finished his/her speech. In the end, she would give general feedback to summarize the overall performance on that day.
To better understand their training condition, I would like to start from how Ashley arranged the training syllabus for Jean and Vincent. The earliest inter-school contest (National Speech Contest) was held in November, so the final winner of the school would have to start his or her training from as early as October. Although neither of the participants in this study participated the National Speech Contest, the school administration had to schedule enough preparation time for anyone who may later take part in it. Thus, for better preparation for the next phase of contest, the school administration decided to hold the intra-school speech contest on Sep. 21th, 2015, although the semester started as early as Aug. 31th, 2015. In other words, Ashley had to choose the representatives to participate the intra-school contest on the first week of the semester and had only two weeks left to train her students. (See Table3.1)
Table 3.1 The Schedule for Training of Intra-school Contest
The Exact week of September Date Related Training Syllabus
The first week of September 8/31-09/04 The first week of the semester The second week of September 09/07-09/11 The training sessions
The third week of September 09/14-09/14 The training sessions
The fourth week of September 09/21, Mon The final day of intra-school contest
Jean and Vincent had four practices in total with each lasting for 30 minutes for
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the intra-school contest, due to the limitation of Ashley’s busy schedule2. Ashley arranged two siestas for junior high, one for Jean and her classmate, and the other one for Vincent and his classmates on the second week of September. For the next week, she arranged two lunch breaks for junior high alone, and the other three practices including both junior and senior high students. The reason why Ashley included both junior and senior high students at the last two practices is to provoke different
stimulus for both sides. Senior students can be the models for junior students to learn from and the performances of some junior students can be good enough to pose some pressure on senior high students to further polish their own speeches. In general, Jean and Vincent had 4 practices before the contest (see Table 3.2).
Table 3.2 The Respective Training Syllabus for Jean and Vincent
Date Students receiving training Objectives
9/10
Jean and her classmate (2 members in total)
a. To better adaptation to the form of
impromptu speech
b. To ease their Anxiety
9/11
Vincent and his classmates (3 members in total)
a. To better adaptation to the form of
impromptu speech
b. To ease their Anxiety
9/16, 9/17, 9/18
Both junior and senior high students
(9 members in total) (5 seniors and 4 juniors)
To rouse different spurs for both junior
and senior students
2 Ashley had four classes to train in total (including two classes in the10th grade, and the other two in the 8th grade), and she only had two weeks to prepare prior to the intraschool contest; in other words, she only had 9 siestas for her to train students from 4 classes, excluding her workshop on Monday of the second week of September.
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3.4.4 Training Process For the Taipei City English Speech Contest
As for the preparation for the Taipei City English Speech contest, Vincent received three times of trainings before the midterm and two times of trainings right after that. The detailed schedule arrangements will be explained as below. Due to various activities and events held in school (See Table 3.3), the time left for extra trainings shrank, especially the contestants had to finalize and submit their speech draft three weeks prior to the Taipei City’s contest (once the script is submitted, it’s not allowed to modify, based on the contest regulation). After the submission, it seemed that contestants have three more weeks to prepare; however, just one week before the contest, Vincent had to prepare for his mid-term exam. In other words, he had to spare his time wiser since he had to perform the two significant tasks
simultaneously, which not only increases the difficulty of preparation but also decreases the time for extra practices. Additionally, based on the grading rubrics on the handbooks from the organizer, aside from 40% points for content, delivery accounts for another 40 % and demeanor also comprise of 20% grades. Therefore, Ashley laid more emphasis on the tone and expression of each sentence to help
Vincent further polish his speech. To examine each sentence carefully, the instructions were performed individually for three times at first (on the week before the Taipei speech contest). After the mid-term, Ashley trained intensively both Vincent and Benjamin (another contestant) for better refinement of their deliveries.
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Table 3.3 The time schedule for school activities
Date Related Events
Mon/Sep/21/2015 The Intra-School Speech Contest Wed/Oct/14/2015,
Thu/Oct/15/2015
The First Mid- Exam
Thu/Oct/29/2015, Fri/Oct/30/2015 Training Camp term
Sat/Nov/7/2015 School Anniversary Celebration
Wed/Nov/11/2015 Prepared Speech Script Submission
Tue/Dec/1/2015, Wed/Dec/2/2015 The Second Mid-term Exam
Sat/Dec/5/2015 Taipei City English Speech
Contest