On the sunny afternoon of April 7th, the 2012 Chinese Speech and Performance Contest was held at Purdue University. The auditorium of Stanley Coulter Hall was crowded with performers and audience. The evaluation committees, which consisted of professors and doctoral students in Chinese and teachers from the Purdue Confucius Institute and Lafayette Confucius Classroom watched the wonderful performance with the audience.

Starting in 2007, this is the fifth Chinese speech contest held at Purdue. With the frequent economic cooperation between China and the U.S., the recent five years have seen an increase of communication between Purdue and some major Chinese universities. As a result, the number of students who study Chinese has risen dramatically as well. Each year the students wanting to register for Chinese courses exceed class limits.

This year there was a total of 35 students participating in the speech contest. They are from different levels in Chinese Program at Purdue University. Their performances were evaluated on pronunciation, fluency and performance. This can accurately indicate their language proficiency as well as effectively show their performing talent, stimulating their interest and motivation for language learning.

The performances this year are of a higher quality. Susan Marquez, a retired high school teacher in Indianapolis, is a passionate Chinese learner who has been auditing Chinese classes at Purdue for two years already and performed as an invited speaker in the contest. She impressed the audience with her fluent Chinese and interesting experiences in China. The audience was also greatly moved by first-year learner Alain EI Howayek's sentimental singing and skillful musicianship. The last performer, Julia Liston, vividly described her experiences in Sichuan province and her understanding of cultural shock. Her humorous stories and standard Sichuan accent brought the contest to a climax and aroused the audiences' great interest in Chinese culture. The speech contest has well displayed the performers' high language proficiency as well as the effective Chinese teaching at Purdue University.

Through comprehensive evaluations, the winners have been selected for each level and the first place winners will go to Northwestern University to participate in the Midwest Chinese Speech Contest to be held on May 5th.