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2016.0607

English Major Brings Honor from the Debate Tournament in Shanghai

The fist English Debate Tournament held by the College of Foreign Languages and Literature of Fudan University was held at the end of March. After fierce competition for few days, the team led by Prof. Charlotte Chang won the first runner up in group ranking and Su Wan Chun from the English Department received the second prize in personal ranking.
The tournament is the first one held for cross-strait communication purposes. The focus of the tournament is Literature, Youth, and Heritage & Growth. There are three stages of this two day competition. The first one is prepared speech, the second one is English debate and the third one is impromptu speech. Students from National Taiwan University, National Taiwan Normal University, National Chengchi University, Soochow University, Shanghai Fudan University, East China Normal University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Tongji University and Shanghai International Studies University went to Shanghai for this tournament in 10 teams. It’s an invaluable chance for students to learn from each other through competition.
Su Wan Chun said that he learned a lot from this experience. Chinese students can explain clearly and have high levels of rhetoric skills. Taiwanese students are creative in the content of speech. For example, the topic of is the period in history you want to visit the most. Chinese students mostly laminate in the past whereas Taiwanese students will think about the problem of modern society.
Prof. Chang said that there was an audition last November. After months of training, 6 were selected to go to Shanghai and 3 of them are debaters and 3 of them are observers. When being asked the most difficulties faced during the past few months, Prof. Chang said that they didn’t have enough time to prepare. The form of this debate is Parliamentary debating, which is different from policy debating taught in NTNU. Hence, they asked senior club members from the NTU English debate club to teach those students. Several debate tournaments were held as well.
The team building is probably the key to success. She said, at the beginning, 9 students all worked really hard because they all wanted to be picked as representative debaters. During the training session, I can tell that they really build up the team spirit. Even though not everyone can be the debaters, they all helped each other for the preparation for debate and speech.