Choral Speaking: The opportunity to learn, advance and win.
It’s a well-known fact that recently almost every job description asks for a minimum of communication skills. The ability for public speaking, addressing different groups of people no matter how big or small. Defending one’s ideas and knowing how to reach people with just a voice. The British Council School wants to prepare its students for the challenges they might have to face in a future. This is why, the Choral Speaking has such importance within the schools’ events.
¿What is the Choral Speaking?
This event is familiar to the School, in particular to the Primary building, being a competition between the different families (A to F) of KS1 an KS2. It is here where each class has the opportunity to interpret on a stage before their families and colleagues a poem or an extract of an English literary piece. These interpretations are usually valued by their creativity on presentation, the charisma of the students and, in general, their ability to convey the poem or extract in relation to other classes.
¿When? ¿Where? ¿How?
After weeks and weeks of preparation, the different key stages o Primary come up to the stage and present, either individually or as a group, their work. The Choral Speaking takes place in May, meaning that students have had a whole year to learn and develop new skills. And because of what´s important for the pupils is important to the British Council, the school offers the facilities of the Theatre; thus, giving more importance to the event and creating a space where the children presenting their work can familiarise themselves with this type of situation.
But who wins?
The best thing about this event is that all students win. Whether in the competition, in their development or progression; every student wins in experience, skills and knowledge. It is true though that to win the actual competition, the students will be judged attending to four categories: pronunciation, diction, artistic interpretation, and level of entertainment. Once all interpretations are finished, the points will be added up and the podium of the families with the highest number of points will be named.
The Choral Speaking is just the beginning.
It is important that students can continue to develop throughout their school years. Choral Speaking is introduced and carried out in Primary School, but this doesn´t mean that once they reach Secondary they can forget about communication skills, especially in public. Students can then participate in the Declamation Speech. Just as the Choral Speaking, they can present an extract of prose or poetry in English, French or even German but this time it will be written by them, and it will be assessed according to different criteria. This way, new skills such as creativity and originality, vocabulary expansion and even planning and structuring are added.