Are you bothered by your poor spoken English? Do you want to share your story or play games in English with international students, students from Tsinghua SIGS (THU SIGS) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) ?
Well, why don’t you go to the English Corner held weekly on Friday nights! The English Corner is jointly organized by the English Associations of PKU, THU and HIT.
The activities are rich and colorful. You can enjoy yummy snacks and play different games, like Werewolf, Truth or Dare and word games in English.
You are free to discuss or argue with other groups and to learn about other cultures through participating in great events like Halloween Pumpkin Night and Christmas.
On 19 March, the first English Corner of this semester was held at the Home for International Friends at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School (PKUSZ). Over 35 students from PKUSZ and the other schools of Shenzhen University Town participated in this event.
Divide into Groups
For this event, participants were divided into 4 groups. Each group had fun talking with their members to come up with a group name that would impress the crowd: Dragon back, Bad guys, 711 and Morning rain. Of course, each group was a complete beginner!
Warm-up and Games
Everybody made a brief self-introduction, included their name, major, school, hometown, hobbies as well favorite food. Then they shared something like favorite song or sports and interesting experiences that impressed them.
The group quickly opens up to each other and people share some of their most fascinating experiences!
This week, the EA organized a picture game. The slides would give pictures. Each group had one guesser and other people in the group described the things in the picture by using sentences. If the guesser got it right, the group would get one point.
Wow, if you were present on the scene, imagine—What should you do to make your teammates guess the right word (like trash) within 20 seconds (you are not allow to say trash directly).
The game was very intense. Everyone racked their brains to describe the picture and show the guesser with their hands. Interestingly, in most cases, the guesser knows the content of picture but can’t think of the right world.
Topic Chat
Looking back on 2020
The next section was a topic discussion. The topic this week was looking back on 2020.
Each person selected some of the events that impressed them the most and shared their views or feelings with their group members. Many groups talked about COVID-19, Versailles literature and the movie Hi Mom; All closely related to our life.
Many participants said that in the past year, due to the epidemic situation, there were many inconveniences in our life; we had to take classes at home, couldn’t do experiments, couldn’t find jobs and had to scan the health code when we went out.
As of noon on March 10, the total box office of Hi, Mom exceeded RMB 5.15 billion, equivalent to more than US$ 785 million, surpassing the 99th place in the global box office list, Deadpool, and officially entered the top 100 box office in the world. Many girls said that they watched this movie during the Spring Festival and were moved to tears. They understood that being a mom is not easy and love their mom.
Let’s hear from some voices about the English Corner:
Wang Zicheng (PHBS): The English Association is especially important here in PKUSZ since the campus is aiming to become more international and foster more talents with globally-sensitive insights. A great number of activities held by the club, such as English corners and business visit are very engaging for us English learners. As for the future, it will be great if the English Association has more speaking-related English activities.
Bella (THU): It’s not my first time to come to the English Corner, I came here about 8 times last semester. I came here tonight to meet more people and to practice my spoken English.I felt that the discussion today was very deep, it was hard to imagine that we could talk about love, affection, gender and other topics with people we don’t know so well, and we expressed our opinions. I would like to suggest that we encourage everyone to express themselves as much as possible in the future English Corner, and we can spread the information about the event to people around us.
Allison Mack (HIT): Oh, As you know, I am a freshman from HIT. This is my first time to be here. Actually, I’m very thrilled and nervous. Tonight’s event is wonderful and meaningful. For me, the game session make me impressed, it is funny. I hope the English Association can do better in the promotional work. You know, it is very different to find the information about English corner.
Written By Dou Min
The Nanyan Observer 