Interview with Professor Stephen Lucas(CCTV senior commentor)
Link & Think: You've been the judge and commentator for English speaking contests in China for all these years. What's your overall impression, both on the contests and the contestants?
Professor Lucas: This is my fourth year judging and commenting the CCTV Cup. I started commenting for 21st Century Cup in 2002.
My general impression on the contestants and the contests are very high. First of all, the contestants are, of course, some are better than the others, the people that went to Grand Finals are particularly skilled, but all of the students show a very high level of English ability and a very high level of speaking ability. And knowing English and doing public speaking are not the same thing. They are two different and very challenging skills. I'm very impressed in what the students are able to do. Public speaking in one's mother tongue is difficult enough; public speaking in a second language is especially difficult. So the level of the contestant, I think, is very high, and it is a testimony to the high level of English learning among students in China in general.
As for the competitions themselves, I think they are very challenging. The 21st Century Cup competition and the CCTV Cup competition are a little bit different. The 21st Century Cup competition—the finals are all in one day, and students do a prepared speech and an impromptu speech and questions and answers. And they are doing in front of a large audience, a live audience of usually 3,000 people or so, and it's very challenging.
The CCTV Cup is different because it's a combination of academics and public speaking skill and entertainment because it's television. And it's very dynamic; it's particularly exciting, I think. Because of that, it has to be good public speaking and it has to be good for the students but it also has to be good television. And I think it's very interesting the way CCTV combines the two to make an event that's unique in the world as far as I know, and really a special event.
Link & Think: So you really think very highly of the contestants. Do you think there is any room for improvement in their speaking?
Professor Lucas: Yes, there is always room for improvement. I think the contestants have gotten better… but there is always room for becoming better as a speaker. We have to remember that these contestants are 18, 19,20 years old, so they are not going to speak with the skill of someone that is 30 or 40 years old and has many many more yearsv experience. I would like to see the contestants sometimes slow down a bit in their debate rounds and be more precise and analytical in their comments. I think that would be very very helpful as probably the most notable thing. They do very well in their prepared speeches usually because they have a lot of time to practice the prepared speech. The biggest challenge is the impromptu speech and the debate speech, and sometimes I think there is too much … particularly the Grand Finals, too many people talking all at once, and not enough logic and not enough analyses, but it makes all this very entertaining because the students get very involved and excited at the same time.
Link & Think: As a judge and commentator, what do you value most in a contestant, the language, the answer to the questions, or the delivery of speech?
Professor Lucas: Well, all three are important, and the most important, however, in a speech, is having something to say. So I think I would rate content number one. I don't grade language number two, but it's very important that language and content are related to one another, because we think in language and we express our ideas in language. Usually the people who have the best content usually have the best language. And delivery of course is very important, because it is a public speaking contest. And delivery is not a substitute for good content and for good language, but if you have good content and good language and you cannot get it across if the delivery is very poor, so you need to have very good delivery as well.
Link & Think: In yesterday's contest, one of the contestants was asked about mandatory courses and elective courses. Do you think public speaking should be made a mandatory course?
Professor Lucas:
Ah, that's my favorite question whether public speaking should be a mandatory course. Actually I'm giving my keynote talk at the conference on that subject tomorrow. I think there is a very important role in the curriculum for English majors for public speaking. And whether it should be a mandatory course or not, I guess I would say I think it should be a mandatory course. It would be ideal if it were, but of course I'm not in charge of curriculum for English departments in China. But it's different from a course in oral English. It deals with English as a working language, it deals with the higher level of skills and it also deals with communication skills, public speaking skills, and those are very very important skills for English majors to have, particularly at this point in China's life. And the demand of the course seems to be growing and there are also a lot of non-English majors who would enjoy taking the course. So I would love to say it a mandatory course, I think it would do good to students. But if you ask a sociologist if sociology course should be mandatory he would say yes, and if you ask an anthropologist he would say the same thing and a mathematician would say the same thing.
Link & Think: So what's the situation of public speaking in the US?
Professor Lucas: It depends on the school. In many schools it is a mandatory course for all students; in some schools it is a mandatory course for some students but not for others. Interestingly, most business schools require public speaking for reasons that should be very self-evident: people that are going into business need to know something about the subject of their business, but they have to be able to communicate that to the people in the business, and if they are selling, they have to be able to communicate it to the people outside the business. Interestingly, another area where public speaking is required in many schools is engineering. For engineers, the National Engineering Association believes that it is crucial for people to have not just technical knowledge in engineering but also the ability to communicate that knowledge with other people in engineering but also with people outside of engineering. So the situation depends from school to school but there are many many schools in which it's required. And of course the department of communication, they teach public speaking, and there are people who study public speaking and rhetoric, which I'll talk about tomorrow in a broader sense, not just as undergraduates, but also as graduate students and also as scholars.
Link & Think: Some of the key universities in China have already made the art of English speaking an elective course, while most of the colleges and universities in China haven't. One reason is the lack of qualified EFL teaching staff. What advice can you give to these schools?
Professor Lucas: Well, if we're going to get more qualified teaching staff in China for public speaking, we need to provide training for those people with the art of public speaking in its current version; we at least have to have a textbook. If we are able to develop a related textbook that is more immediately adapted to China, that would help because it would come with teaching materials for China. The art of public speaking in the US has come through many teaching materials, and if we could adapt those for people in China, that would be very helpful. Then of course workshops are a helpful way of communicating this. But the other thing I've found is that sometimes Chinese teachers are reluctant to make the jump into teaching the course if they don't know everything about it. It is a challenge for them, but I've had people who come to the United States. They have studied with me, and even after their study they are still apprehensive, but they returned to China and they jumped in and they teach the course very successfully. And for similar things, people who stayed in China taught the course. But one has to take the step like jumping into water even though the water is cold. Once when the water is warm enough, they'll do very well. Students like this course. They want this course. They enjoy this course. And it's a course that people can teach very effectively, but we need to provide more resources for those people, and that's one of the things that I've been hoping to try to do for not just this trip in China, but in Chin in general.
Link & Think: Just like one of the contestants was asked whether the national football team of China should hire a foreign coach, do you think it's good for Chinese schools to find native English speakers to be the coach for English public speaking?
Professor Lucas: That's a very good question. I think for English pronunciation, articulation and accent, if you have a native speaker, sometimes it can be more effective. But the native speaker also has to be able to speak Chinese so as to communicate with students in their native tongue at certain times. As far as hiring people from the West or the US to be speech coaches, it really depends on the person. I'm very impressed with the level of work that the Chinese tutors have been able to do with their students that are in the competition. They've done a very nice job and they're working at a very high level. That's a way that many people have gotten exposed to public speaking so that people that now desire us of teaching public speaking courses are people that have gotten involve in the subject by working as tutors. And if we had all foreigners doing that, you wouldn't get the same native involvement. I think it's very important for China to develop its own skills in that regard. And they are skills, I mean, for English majors, wevre talking about traditions of public speaking as they are practiced in the west, but those traditions have become the international protocol for public speaking, and it's very important for students that are going on to work in a globalized world outside China or to give speeches to international conferences or academic conferences to be able to have those skills.
Link & Think: Yesterday Ms Chen Xiaowei asked one of the contestants about the possibility of Chinese public speaking contests being held in the UK or in the US, or even at your university. I wonder what you think about this.
Professor Lucas: You know I was going to say something about this on the commentary but other things came up and I didn't get the opportunity to. I think it would be wonderful in that Chinese is the fastest growing language in the United States but the Chinese skills of the American students are nowhere near the English skills of Chinese students. There would be many years before they were capable of doing in a competition what Chinese students are doing in the public speaking competitions like the CCTV Cup.
