Year 7 and 8 English Competitions 2019

The BIS English Department traditionally end the academic year with some challenging and enjoyable competitions involving whole year groups at KS3, and this year saw Year 7 classes go head-to-head to find the overall Poetry Recital winner, with Year 8 verbally sparring to decide the year group’s Public Speaking champion.

Year 7 students watched a number of poetry performances and read a number of interesting, unusual and powerful poems with their teachers to get a sense of how to choose a suitable poem, and how to read it to engage an audience. After selecting then practising their poems, class competitions led to a year group final. This was held on Monday 24th June in The Curve, with a judging panel of Miss Binnington, Mr Donnelly, and student English ambassador Christine Le watching, listening and then discussing to find our winner and runner-up. The choice of poems was broad; covering classics, haikus, and students own poems, and the quality was excellent.

But the runner-up and winner stood out with poems and performances that were both memorable and powerful.

So a huge congratulations to runner-up Helene Badcock (7V) for her mesmerising choice by Maya Angelou, and our overall winner Christine Nguyen (7H) for her superb own poem exploring what it means to be a young, Asian adult.

Christine Nguyen

Helene Badcock

For Year 8, the students competed in the annual public speaking competition where each student wrote speeches and then presented them in front of their peers in class. After a class vote, one winner from each form was put forward to compete against the year group. Held in the auditorium on Tuesday 25th June, the topics were wide ranging - discussing everything from ‘The Importance of Art’ to ‘Should guns be illegal?’.  Our judging panel of Mr McDevitt, Ms Webb and, once again, student English ambassador Christine Le, watched, listened and deliberated to choose the best speakers based on engaging delivery, clear structure and persuasive argument. While all the speeches were of superb quality, the runner-up and the winner really stood out due to the relevance of their topics to current global issues.

Congratulations to runner-up Min Young Kim (8B) for her thoughtful speech on gender equality and to the winner Min An Mai (8I) for her excellent and highly relevant speech on gender inequality in sport.

Overall, the end of the year gave BIS students a great chance to show their enthusiasm and ability to rise to any challenge set by their teachers. The competitions proved, once again, that our students are passionate, dedicated and have the confidence to stand up and give great performances! Well done to all of Year 7 and Year 8!

Discover more:

• Service learning: English advertising community partner competition