On April 24th, the 4th National College Japanese Speech Contest came to an end. Zhang Peiqing, an English-French major from class 1602 of JISU, won the first prize. Liu Xiaohui, a teacher of the Japanese Department of the School of Oriental Languages, was granted the Excellent Instructor Award.

This contest was co-sponsored by the Advisory Committee of Foreign Language Teaching in Universities, the Ministry of Education, PR. China ( Japanese Branch), and the Foreign Language Research Association of the Universities (Japanese Branch). Organized by the School of Japanese Culture and Economics of Xi’an International Studies University, the contest has drawn Non-Japanese major competitors from 57 universities including Yanbian University, Jinan University, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, and Xi’an International Studies University, making it the highest level of Japanese speech contest.

The contest consisted of two parts: a speech on given topics along with an extemporaneous speech. Both were conducted online. The scoring standards included four major items: pronunciation and intonation, grammar and vocabulary, content structure, and expression capability. The online contest limited preparation time of extemporaneous speech to only 10 seconds. In this fierce competition, the students of JISU finally won the first prize after overcoming all obstacles.

Zhang Peiqing was admitted to the English-French major of JISU in 2016. She studied hard and has passed the TEM-4 and TFS-4. With her enthusiasm for Japanese language, she started to minor in Japanese in 2018. She said, “I feel very lucky and happy to have the opportunity to learn three foreign languages in JISU. This contest is a test of my learning and it also stimulates me further to continue to learn languages. I’m grateful to JISU for providing us a platform for our learning and growth under careful guidance of our excellent teachers. I will continue to work hard to lay a solid foundation for the cultural exchanges between Chinese and foreign languages.”