The ceremony of awarding the winners of the 3rd UIC MET English Speaking Contest were held on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at LRC. Vice President Professor Zhang Cong, ELC Director Dr. Viola Wong, and Deputy College Librarian Ms. Fung Ying Cham were in attendance to hand out the prizes to the winners.

At his welcome speech, Professor Zhang encouraged the attendees to make good use of the abundant resources UIC provides them to improve their English. “Learning a second language requires hard work and a lot of practice”, said Professor Zhang, sharing his early experience of studying in Switzerland, not fluent in the new language at the very beginning. He urged the students to take the initiative and take every opportunity to practice speaking with their friends, teachers, and the MET program every day.

Professor Zhang Cong delivers his welcome speech

Dr. Viola Wong told the winners that the MET contest award was a recognition of their hard work. She encouraged students to enjoy practicing English with MET—to experiment with accents, tones, to make “funny noises”, and to see MET as the beginning of their practice before they feel confident to talk with other people in English.

Dr. Viola Wong talks to the attendees

After receiving their awards, the 1st place winner, Wu Hanqiu, a year three student from DBM who received a score of 91.86, and the 2nd place winners, Jiang Shunmei, year one, and Liang Hao, year two, who received scores of 90.468 and 90.05 respectively, shared their experiences of participating in the contest.

The 3rd UIC MET English Speaking Contest was jointly organized by the Learning Resource Centre and the English Language Centre from April 22nd to May 7th. Students could submit multiple recordings of contest texts to the MET contest wherein they would be graded on a scale of 0-100. In total, there were over 160 contestants, 26% of which scored 80 or higher.

The winners should all be proud of what they achieved, and all participants should take pride in going the extra mile in their studies.

The awardees and presenters

Excerpts of contestants’ testimonials:

Wu Qiuhan: “This award will provide me with the strength to put more effort in my future studies in English.”

Jiang Shunmei: “I think MET is more than a software that helps you correct your mistakes when speaking, it also provides you with a platform where off-campus you can still have chances to practice oral English.”

Wang Shengyu: “I learnt a lot from this competition; by practicing and imitating I found notable improvement of my pronunciation day by day.”

List of the awardees at the contest: