Rostrum Voice of Youth
Posted on November 2, 2020
Thank you to Lily Neyland and Zoe Adams for their report on Rostrum Voice of Youth.
Regional final:
On the 17 October 2020, four Friends’ students competed in the Southern Regional Final of the Rostrum Voice of Youth competition. Rostrum is an organisation that aims to assist its members in developing their public speaking and meeting skills. Each year the Rostrum Voice of Youth competition is run across Australia and aims to foster and develop public speaking skills in young people. Three Year 10 students – Annabel Woolward, Lily Neyland and Zoe Adams – competed in the senior category of the competition whilst Isabel Adams (Year 7) competed in the junior section. The year ten girls had taken part in this competition as a follow up from their participation in the annual Mary Stanfield Public Speaking Prize. Lily and Annabel both competed on the topic of “A message to critics”, the same topic as the students in the Mary Stanfield competition. Zoe chose to speak about “Isolated from humanity” and Isabel chose “A story that matters”. In the senior category, each speaker had eight minutes to deliver their prepared speech and in the junior category they had six minutes. In both categories the participants then had 15 minutes to prepare a three minute impromptu speech. All four girls put in their best effort and received encouraging and constructive feedback from their adjudicators.
State final:
After competing in the regional final, Lily Neyland was lucky enough to be selected as one of two people from the Southern Final to compete in the State Final at Scotch Oakburn College in Launceston on 24 October. There were five senior speakers and seven junior speakers selected from around the state to participate in this final, and this year, 76 people participated in the Tasmanian Competition. The competition took place in the same format as the regional competition. For the prepared speech, the participants spoke to the same topic as they had in the regional competition, followed by a short preparation speech, once again given only 15 minutes to prepare a three-minute speech. The short and long preparation speeches in both the Junior and Senior section were all of fantastic quality, and the judges in both these sections commented to participants that it was extremely hard to decide on a winner. Unfortunately this year, Tasmania was the only state that was able to run a Rostrum Voice of Youth Competition this year due to COVID-19 restrictions, which meant that the winners were unable to attend a national final in Adelaide, which would usually be the case. It was a fantastic experience for all that attended, and many, if not all, will be back next year to try even harder!
