English Competition

At site, there was a 2nd Annual English Competition. This happened the last week in April. PCVs from other areas of Kazakhstan came to assist with the competition. It was really the first time that I had guests since being at site and I was UBER excited to show them my town!! The first Volunteers arrived the day before the competition and were given kind of a “run-down” of how the competition would go down. Then we all wandered to the lake where we removed our socks and shoes, rolled our pants up and walked into the water! We attempted to take pictures where the people in the picture were jumping – we were only successful a few timesJ

Friday was the day of the actual English Competition. It lasted approximately one hour in the afternoon. All people were where they were supposed to be. The test started with an assembly where everyone spoke and then students went to their designated testing areas. As a PCV my role was to wait at the school until the test was over, then collect the tests from the monitors, who were local teachers of anything EXCEPT English. We then began the tedious task of grading all tests! This took some time…thankfully, BridgeTV and brownies were there to assist us through itJ

Saturday the winners of the Written Round were announced and invited to take place in Round Two (kind of like American Idol…only notJ), on Monday morning. In the evening we had a special English Club for those students would be taking part in round two.

Round Two was the oral round. In which the participants would be asked open ended questions and had to respond as best they could – it was a 20 minute interview! These were taped and listened to afterwards so that a winner could be decided and announced. This was time consuming as there were 7 winners from each grade and there were 5 grades – it was a lot of people to get through, thankfully, other Volunteers came to assist with the project. Of course, they couldn’t stay forever, and had to return back to their sites, but not before playing Dance, Dance, Revolution at the local bowling ally!! WOO WOO!!

Final winners have been announced and an assembly is being planned to praise them publicly for a job well done!!