Amidst these dire pandemic days, English Olympiad has come up with a special event with the purpose of creating an opportunity for the students to pass their idle time in something productive. This year, they have strayed away from their usual English Olympiad event. Instead, they have launched 'Pro-Linguist: Battle Of Linguistic Wizards' to engage students from various levels in a diverse range of contests.
All the competitions can be broadly categorised into two segments: submission and live. The submission based segments included eight competitions. Six of them were open for all level of education. They were -- Artistic Writing, Article Writing, Poem Recitation, Art on Article, Creative Writing, and Tongue Twisters. In addition, there was Poem Writing which was open for students from class six and above. And lastly, there was "Be Your Favourite" which was open for students below class eight.
On the other hand, the live section included six events - PPDT (Picture Perception and Description Test), Spell the Word, Series Based Quiz, Turn the Coat, Grammar Nazi, and Cartoon Based Quiz. The participants were categorised into five groups based on their educational level -- till class 2, class 3-5, class 6-8, class 9-12, and seniors (above HSC).
The topics and formats of the competitions were unique by themselves. The event included tests on the building blocks of language learning such as spelling, grammar, fluency, writing, speaking, and even creativity. But it did not stop there. .
The adjudicator panel included talents from universities of the country. In addition, there were special guests for some of the contests. For example, Shaira Afrida Oyshee, author of highly praised books like "All The Quiet Places", "On The Days Like This" was the guest judge for Poetry Writing and Poetry Recitation. Muhammad Abrar, founder and CEO of Project Debi was the guest judge for Artistic Writing. And Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy, founder of Cartoon People was guest judge for Art on Article.
In addition, Md Sohan Haidear, founder and CEO of Smartifier Academy, and chief corporate trainer of Zengage BD was brought to the event as the special judge for Article Writing whereas Zakia Ferdous, assistant professor at Shanto-Mariam University of Creative Technology was brought as special judge to pick the winners and runners up from all groups. The event was full of surprises as well. Rafsan Sabab, host of "What a Show" joined the event as the host for the grand finale of "Turn The Coat".
The Financial Express was the media partner of this mega event.
The organising body of this event was the global platform called English Olympiad. They have over 4,000 campus ambassadors spread across 27 countries. They have organised over 100 workshops and conferences for interested participants and young entrepreneurs to show them the right way of learning English to compete globally.
Their Chief Organiser, Mohammad Aman Ullah ecstatically stated, "Keeping 68 per cent of our youth engaged with positive activities in this pandemic time was the prime purpose of this event. Thousands of participants, guardians, and viewers enjoyed this event with enthusiasm and inspiration."
The writer is a third year student of BBA programme at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka. He can be reached at rashikriasat404@gmail.com