Choate sent students to the CT COLT Poetry Recitation Contest on Wednesday, April 6 for the first time in two years. Twenty-four Choate students traveled to East Haven High School to compete against hundreds in the “Super Bowl” of high school foreign language contests, as the Choate website calls it. Out of the 24 Choate students that attended, 15 of them were medalists in their categories.
Saloni Jaiswal ’16, a participant that won second place in Arabic, commented, “The COLT competition is a really wonderful learning experience. There aren’t very many opportunities in the language department to showcase your skills, so this was just a really great channel to improve my ability and my understanding of the language.”
Sponsored by the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers (CT COLT), a nonprofit aiming to promote language proficiency and knowledge of world cultures, the contest drew approximately 600 students from 53 schools to compete in 16 different languages, from Polish to Japanese.
COLT, a nonprofit organization founded in 1968, provided a slate of poems, grouped by level and language, from which students could pick. Some teachers chose to grade students on their recitations, while others used them as an enjoyable class activity.
In most classes, students either voted for a winner, or the teacher decided on the best recitation. However, some of the upper-level classes were so small that students simply volunteered to perform their poems.
Michelle Zhuang ’18 remarked, “I’m in AP Chinese, so I was one of the students who volunteered to participate in the contest. Public speaking has always been one of my strengths, so I just wanted the opportunity to practice that in a different way than through poetry recitation.”
Only the first place winners in the school competition advanced to the state competition. At the state competition, one room contained ten students of the same language and level and two or three teachers volunteering as judges. Students were judged on memorization, diction, interpretation, and body language.
As judges decided on awards, the school offered entertainment and the opportunity for students from across Connecticut to meet each other. Entertainment included piano and chorus performances.
Although Choate has been participating in the COLT contest for more than 20 years, students didn’t have the opportunity to travel to the state finals the last two years because the event occurred during Spring Break.
Even though Choate does not send students to the contest each year, teachers still find value in incorporating poetry recitation into the foreign language curriculum.
Spanish teacher Ms. Patricia Antunez said, “Reciting poetry doesn’t feel the same as presenting a project in front of your classmates. You look at the words in a different way and really bring out the musicality of it, which is why I think that students tend to enjoy poetry.”
Ms. Carol Chen-Lin, who represents the Chinese language teachers on the CT COLT Board of Directors, said, “I like to say that poetry is the marriage between literature, music, and drama.”
Language Department Head Ms. Diana Beste echoed this statement. She commented, “As a language teacher, there’s something really exciting about being in a huge auditorium with hundreds of students and colleagues who are all there for one reason: to celebrate language and poetry.”
