On 8th November, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia and the ACT Government Education Directorate co-hosted the 2018 Mandarin Presentation Contest Awards Ceremony at the Hedley Beare Centre for Teaching and Learning in Canberra. The ceremony was witnessed by hundreds of students, teachers and parents, where 11 schools’ principals, Mandarin teachers and students were presented with certificates to highlight their dedication to Mandarin education and achievement.
The significance of the annual ACT Mandarin Presentation Contest and Awards Ceremony is to recognise outstanding Australian students who took part in the Mandarin language learning program in the ACT and neighbouring areas. There were 1,434 students of all school levels who participated in this year’s contest. Some 64 winners were selected from one university and 10 schools, including Mulwaree High School from Goulburn NSW joining ACT schools for the very first time.
Presenting the awards ceremony this year were Mr Elliot Charng, representative of Taiwan in Australia, and Ms Kate McMahon, director of learning and teaching of the ACT Education Directorate. Representative Charng gave an inspirational address recounting his English as second language learning experience as a school boy and how rewarding it is to make the language useful by immersing into English-speaking countries.
Ms McMahon congratulated the students as well as the teachers for taking part in the ceremony. She was delighted to see that the quality of the finalists was excellent and represented the high levels of commitment by the students towards their language studies and the hard work and dedication of ACT language teachers.
The ceremony was concluded with 16 showcases designed by Mandarin learning students supervised by Mandarin teachers. The highlights of which showed the students capability to engage in a broad range of language knowledge with creativity. Highlights included:
- Mawson Primary School: Mawson choir (K-2 students) who gave a beautiful performance of 2 songs in Chinese and English, in addition to a video drama demonstrated by the winning students
- Torrents Primary School: fan dance by year 5 and 6 Torrens girls; Chinese song singing and sign language by year 2, 5 and 6 students
- Mulwaree High School: A beautifully crafted background film created by the winning students, playing alongside a live performance by Bryn Wood on guitar and Micah Absalom singing, showcased impressive team work
- Canberra College: Martin Ma and Lawren Sun who gave performance of the music “Butterfly Lovers”, a Chinese legend of a tragic love story of a pair of lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai
- Gungahlin College: Sam Wade presented a speech about how he loved learning Chinese and his future plan to use his gap year exploring Taiwan
- Narrabundah College: Patricia Nyandi gave a speech on the topic of Taiwanese movies introducing Taiwan’s iconic movies from the 1970s throughout to 2017
- The Australian National University: 2 students who studied Chinese for merely one year, Faith Myers sang in fluent Chinese and Elijah Buchli performed impressively on the demonstration of Chinese calligraphy.
Representative Elliott Charng (left 3) and executive director Dr Aaron Chen (left 1) of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia were photographed with Ms Kate McMahon (left 2), director of learning and teaching of the ACT Government Education Directorate, and ACT and NSW school principals, deputy principals and delegates at the 2018 ACT Mandarin Presentation Contest Awards Ceremony.
