William, Feifei, Alison and Finn get ready to go to China

The "21st Century Lenovo Cup National English Speaking Competition" took place in Shanghai on Friday 10th April. Alison Konieczny, Editor of the China Team, was one of the judges of the 26 finalists.

The standard of speaking was very high and the competition was fierce but there could only be one overall winner and that was Jin Lu from Tsinghua University.

Jin Lu, winner of the competition, standing on the right

The competition was followed by the "21st Century International English Language Teaching Forum" on Saturday 11th April 2009. William Kremer, one of our BBC China Team producers, gave a talk on using humour in public speaking.

Background to the competition

Over the last decade, the competition has gradually grown into an annual national English celebration with a gathering of outstanding people with star talent. As the most prestigious event of its kind in China, the competition serves as the country’s qualifying contest for the annual International Public Speaking Competition in London.

21st Century is one of our 16 partners in China, and their website carries some of the content from our bilingual ELT website.

In the next couple of weeks we will keep you updated with the events.

At last year’s competition, Sun Yi 孙怡 was the winner of the BBC Best Impromptu Speech （即席演讲）. Last summer, Sun Yi had two weeks' work experience with BBC Learning English in London to learn the basic skills 基本技巧 of making programmes. While she was here she also took a weekend trip to Oxford and Cambridge, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath.

Sun Yi on a visit to Cambridge

See more information about Sun Yi's UK visit here.