Representatives of five universities - Mining University, ITMO, Polytechnic University, St. Petersburg State University and Higher School of Economics - took part in the "Spelling Bee" competition, which is very popular in many countries of the world, but so far little known in Russia. Its essence is to spell words correctly, reproducing their written form.
About 15 people competed for the status of the most " trained in English ", including representatives of Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Iran, Russia, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uzbekistan. The winner of the competition was Khapi Omarova from the University of Mining, and the prizewinners were Sergey Lepikhov from ITMO and Ertiné Doptan from the Higher School of Economics.
"This is a knock-out tournament which consists of many rounds. In each round, participants are asked to say one word. If they do well, they move on to the next round; if they make a mistake, they become spectators. The words get progressively more difficult, so the contestants can both have fun and check their knowledge, and learn new terms. This is the main purpose of the contest - to inspire the players to work harder on expanding their vocabulary," said Vitaly Spiryagin, a fourth-year student of the Mining University and one of the main organisers of the event.
The competition was held at the Linguistics Centre of Russia's oldest higher technical education institution. It was initiated by the Mining English Speaking Club with the assistance of the English clubs of each of the participating universities.
"It was a completely new experience, but in this case the first one definitely didn't go wrong. This is the opinion of all participants and spectators. Moreover, we managed to gather teams from five major universities of St. Petersburg, which may become a starting point for a number of profile joint projects and contribute to popularisation of foreign language learning among St. Petersburg youth," said Anton Gorbunov, a graduate student of the Mining University and one of the judges of the event.
As organizator and Mining University student Diego Monterrey explained, in most languages of the world there is a close connection between the way words sound and the way they are written. But in English, there are many different ways of spelling the same sounds.
"English has tended to assimilate various foreign words throughout its centuries of existence, just as it has done with French, Greek and Spanish. This, combined with its Latin and Germanic origins, makes it particularly difficult to standardise, and so the game of Spelling Bee is very interesting and fun," Diego explains.
At the end of the evening, Ksenia Gladina, a student of the Polytechnic University and also a contest judge, thanked the St. Petersburg Mining University for hosting the event and expressed her hope for further cooperation between the universities.