Pupils Host a Talk Show in German at ASU

On February 19-20, the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Astrakhan State University hosted the regional stage of the all-Russian German competition among pupils.

The competition involved pupils of the Astrakhan Linguistic Gymnasium, Astrakhan gymnasiums No.3 and 4 and Znamensk gymnasium No. 231.

The first day of the competition saw a written contest which included a grammar & vocabulary test, a cultural quiz, a reading task, listening and writing.

The grammar & vocabulary tasks were to fill in the gaps in the original text. The cultural quiz included questions on the history and culture of German-speaking countries. The reading task consisted of two parts: putting “true” or “false” near each statement, given after the original text, and completing 8 sentences to make each of them a coherent text. The listening task was to listen an interview twice and then complete a number of exercises. Finally, the participants were given the beginning and ending of a story and they were to write its main part. This creative task is designed to check pupils’ writing skills, level of their speech culture, the ability to move beyond banality and stock phrases, to work spontaneously and creatively.

The second day, which saw an oral contest and summing up, started with general instructions for the participants, who were divided into groups of three and were to prepare and present a talk show on a given topic to the competition jury.