Dos and Definitely Don’ts for the JHS Speech Contest.

The speech contest is a fixture of junior and senior high schools in Japan, though only a small minority of students ever consider doing it. As resident native speaker, you will be tasked with helping those students practice for it.

You may receive little or no information about it, or your school might give you a few leaves of paper written in Japanese that you may or may not understand. In any case, I’ve coached a couple of students to victory in their local contests and been a judge a few times too, so I hope this brief guide can assist any ALTs helping their students prepare for the event.

Contents

• Advantages for Participants
• The Guide – Pt. 1: Correcting and Memorizing the Text
• Pt. 2: Gestures
• Pt. 3: Pronunciation
• Pt. 4: Intonation
• Pt. 5: Planning Your Practice Sessions
• Pt. 6: The Final Practices
• Last of Many Notes

Advantages for Participating Students

The students taking part in the speech contest are usually very motivated. You may not have had a chance to speak to them properly or notice that they’re particularly interested in English, especially if you’re in a bigger school. Many kids refrain from speaking up in class or tend to be generally quiet, so this opportunity offers them tailored advice from a native speaker to meet their needs.

The main reason I think the speech contest can be a great thing to do is that the students can experience what it’s like to be fluent, even if it’s just for those few minutes they’re on the stage. I got this notion from Olly Richards in this video when he was talking about preparing mini-speeches as a beginner, and I found it a very inspiring point. It’s important time spent in the language that the other students just don’t get. Plus, the ideas are all their own, so in this “preview of mastery” they can hear how they might sound if they were to become fluent.

Another reason it can be a valuable experience is it’s a chance for students to find out about some language practice techniques that they usually wouldn’t get from a group lesson… if you tell them!

What you’re about to read is based on my experiences, which were in Tottori and Yamaguchi prefectures. These places are not known for their sprawling metropolises so your situation may end up being different to what I describe, but I think there should be something helpful for you if you’re a new ALT. Some of the performances I’ve seen crossed the border into the ridiculous (rotating your hand exuberantly… for the ENTIRE speech? Really?!), which I can at least say shouldn’t happen if you take on board some of the advice you’ll read here.

So without further ado, of which there has been much, here’s my speech contest guide for ALTs.

The Guide

A main principle of this guide is to tackle the big hurdles first. Glaring pronunciation errors and so forth. These will make a huge difference and are often easy wins that give confidence to the student.

Pt. 1: Correcting and Memorizing the Text

If the student is performing their own speech, you’ll have to correct it, edit it a bit (…or a lot), but not re-write it. I mean, you could re-write it, but why would you? It’s not the student’s speech any more, and you’d only be diminishing the achievement if they win.

As soon as that’s done, the student should get to memorizing it. It may seem long, but they’re hardly going to be memorizing the Koran. Do it paragraph by paragraph if need be, and feed in obvious gestures from the start. These can act as memory pegs as well as giving the student the best chance to get used to the actions. I think I’ve only seen a student completely forget their lines on stage once in 5 contests, so I wouldn’t worry aboot that.

Also, no need to try and explain memory palaces or any jive like that to them. Rote learning is how they will do the heavy lifting. Be glad you don’t have to do it and be amazed when they’ve learned it all perfectly.

Also, show the student clips of relevant speeches so they can see the kind of 感じ that they’re going for. TED Talks, for example… just not that Sam Hyde one, ok?

They can then adopt the appropriate demeanor from the start.

Pt. 2: Gestures

The biggest problems with participants’ gestures that I’ve seen are:

• Too many gestures. Some act as if they believe they’ll get more points the more they gesture. Dis bad.
• No gestures at all. Maybe they didn’t get any advice about them, adopted an inappropriate style, or were just too nervous. Still, better than doing too many, and certainly better than the next point, which is…
• Wild, outlandish gestures. I have no idea why so many students fall into this trap. The most remarkable one I’ve seen was during a recitation of the notorious A Mother’s Lullaby, which is about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. At the point at which the bombing itself is directly referred to exploding over the city, the student proceeded to stretch her arms out comically wide (“a biiiig bomb!”) and simulate the weapon hitting its target.

I was shocked, Jeff.

In cases like this, I have a feeling the student must be going rogue, perhaps believing they have the ultimate gesture up their sleeve. Oh, the follies of youth. Explaining the purpose of gestures to them, highlighting their simplicity (as they should be natural), and providing real examples can hopefully reduce their inclination to graphically gesture the deaths of thousands. Use the above Hiroshima story and emphasise how ひどいよ it was if need be.

In general, I think less is more. Gestures do indeed differ across cultures, so it will require some attention. I consider natural-looking movements of the head and things like scanning across the audience as gestures. These are often easily tagged to certain parts of the speech. For example, if the speech has groups of three (“I spend my time playing tennis, playing the piano and studying”), a simple ‘look left, then centre, then right’ instruction is all that’s needed. These kinds of gestures involve less body movement too, so aren’t too taxing.

Just make sure they’re natural.

Also, I shouldn’t have to write this, but never laugh at a student, even if the gesture they come up with is funny. They’re just kids putting themselves out there.

Pt. 3: Pronunciation

In the practice session you can drill particular sentences that have the pronunciation point in question. Be sure to introduce them to connected speech and connect the words on their print-out of the speech.

Then, show the student how to self-correct when practising at home, which we shall go into now.

You will of course have to record the whole speech for them to practise with. Put it a CD or Soundcloud, or both. Then, as you go week-to-week, put particular target sentences on their own tracks. Soundcloud is better for this. Then, they can record themselves for comparison on a parents’ smartphone, or using some free recording software (I use Reaper and Audacity) if they’re into that.

I recommend the students do something like this at home in their own time:

1. Listen to your recording of the target sentence.
2. Record themselves attempting it.
3. Listen back to both and compare, listening for any nuances and differences they might notice.
4. Repeat this process 10 or more times.
5. Compare their first recording to the last and marvel at how much better it sounds!
6. Go on to a new sentence and repeat process.

It’s pretty simple, but lots of people never even consider it! I don’t remember where I got it, but I don’t remember from whence it came. I know Dogen promotes it strongly, and I remember seeing something similar on JapanesePod101 way way back. Try it yourself in Japanese (or any language) if you haven’t done so before as proof of concept. Over time it makes a massive difference.

Also, give them the above 6 steps in Japanese (ChatGPT may be your future overlord, but here it’s your friend if you’ve no Japanese).

How much heavy lifting?

You should only be giving 3 or 4 sentences a week for practice as they have many other things to do. Choose there sentences based on their Big Problems, which you presumably have identified in the first session. This will differ for each student, so be sure to assess their strong and weak points honestly. I had a student who, although not fluent, had amazing pronunciation because she had been imitating American radio on in her house since she was very young (it was fun, apparently!). Unfortunately, she chose a very dramatic topic that needed a very emotional delivery and didn’t match her naturally very calm and reserved character.

A student of mine fixed her l/r sounds in a couple of days using the technique described above. A few weeks after the contest, when she had naturally stopped practising pronunciation, she noticed in class that it had slipped back and corrected herself immediately and was better from then on. That represented a clear level-up thanks to the process of doing the speech contest, with benefits long afterwards.

Pt. 4: Intonation

Similar to pronunciation in terms of practice, only a bit more nebulous. The student will likely pick up a lot from your recording, but again you should address the big things first, such as the general shape of sentences. You can use the glorious power of red pen on paper for this. Do it listening to your recording to make sure it’s accurate.

The rest will depend on the topic, and will be working on the appropriate emotion and tone. I think you’re likely to spend much less time on this than pronunciation, by comparison.

Pt. 5: Planning a practice sessions

Approach each session like you would a lesson. What’s your goal? What are you specifically going to do for each stage? You might only have 20 minutes (or less!), so your plan could look something like this:

1. Small talk (How did the practice go? Any questions?) 1-3mins
2. Full reading w/ script. Take notes. Make comments. 4mins
3. Targeted pronunciation drill and set practice w/ recording at home as homework 5mins
4. Talk about gestures. Add one in. Practice w/ full speech. 4mins
5. Try speech from memory 3mins
6. Final comments and remind about practicing at home (record specific sentences using the pronunciation practiced earlier. 1min

This will make things easier for you to track progress and make sure you hit all the points you need to.

Make your own scorecard

To assist with your evaluation of the student, make a more detailed scorecard if the one you got looks something like this:

To break this down differently to aid with your training, you may want to do something more like this. You can use that PDF or make something similar.

Judges, in my experience, had almost no time to score properly. There were just seconds between performances. What’s more, there were a lot of subjective criteria and no indication on how many points, say, volume should be worth within the larger banner of “Phonetically Viewed”, if we take the above example. However, if you get a bit more granular with your own scorecard for the practice sessions, your student should have a better chance of performing well.

Pt. 6: The Final Practices

• Practice in front of other teachers to build confidence.
• There may or may not be a microphone, so practice projecting while still sounding natural in case there isn’t one, and if you can practice on a stage with one too.
• If the student is nervous, remind them of all the practice they’ve done and how much they’ve improved. They’re already better than before, no matter how the speech goes tomorrow. Permission for sports coach speak granted.

The Last of Many Notes

Of course, your student may well work their socks off and still not win. Some kids have natural advantages. Sometimes you’ll see kids up there who appear damn near fluent and you’ll wonder how they were allowed compete.

One time a judge contradicted the other six judges on the panel by giving a very low score to one student. The rest of us were unanimous in giving her a high score but he had a stick up his ass about something silly and she didn’t win because of him, despite clearly being the best (this guy popped up another time with a rather, er, whimsical portrayal of Irish music, which is a story for a future post).

Another time a girl was disqualified on moral grounds. She’d written about how she’d fallen into bullying someone and regretted it. However, she delivered her speech quite well and naturally felt pleased with herself, and couldn’t help cracking a satisfied grin upon completing the speech. The result of this? She “came across as creepy”, apparently. She would have come second.

All this to say, some things like the whims of hopelessly petty judges are out of your hands, but if your student does a decent job and you follow the guidelines of this post, you should have a chance. The standard varies so much and the value for most people won’t be in the winning of it anyway.

Any other tips for the speech contest? Write them in below!

And if you know any other ALTs who’d be interested in this do share it with them. I’d be keen to hear how my experiences compare with those of you living elsewhere.

Keep on scuttlin’!

Read more about being an ALT here.