A Champion Speaker

What makes someone a good speaker? How about a great speaker? It may seem that some people are born natural speakers, while the rest of us get stage fright, butterflies in our stomachs, and get tongue tied. When we look at the lives of great speakers, we find that many of them worked hard to learn the skills.

I have never thought that I could become a speaker who can speak in front of a class or in front of a group of parents. However, I jumped into a new world that I have three different groups of audience. Sometimes I am an English teacher to the students. Sometimes I am a supervisor to our foreign teachers. And sometimes I am the host of the singing performance and graduation show that all students and parents are watching me on the stage. I am not a shy person, but I wasn't born to be a speaker either. I have worked really hard to learn not only from my colleagues, but also from the students and parents during the past half year at Happy Marian.

Some people might wonder what you could have learned from the students and their parents. Well, if I do not know what kind of audience I am going to have, then there is no way I can be fully prepared for a good speech or performance. A good speaker never talks to himself / herself for he / she talks to the audience. A great speaker can draw most of the audience's attention and touch their hearts.

Melody was a student in P6 last semester. I had not really talked to her before she got into the semi - final speech contest. I remember the day we went to the training session was the first time we really talked, related, and bonded. After the training session, we shared our opinions of different contestants. We knew we had strong competitors. Every contestant not only is well practiced in pronunciation, intonation, and stage manner, but wears a beautiful smile on the face as well. We needed to make ours unique so people would open up their ears when they hear our speech. We practiced again and again, day and night. During those days, Melody got frustrated and upset, and even cried. However, she did not give up or let us down. She gave an outstanding and heartwarming speech from her heart. She did it! She won the first prize and became the “Champion”.

Being a great speaker requires a lot of hard work, practice and actual stage experience whether you're born with a talent or not. I am not sure how much speech contest experience I will be going through with my students or how much help I can offer them. There is always more room for improvement. I will listen to more opinions on how to improve myself to be a better speaker in class, in meetings, and on stage. And of course, I will provide as much help as I can to my students in the future. I believe everyone can become a great speaker with hard work. Meet us at Happy Marian!

Douglas University College (Business Management) Emi Yao