Students Embrace Vocabulary Olympics

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Students Embrace Vocabulary Olympics

Results are now in for the second annual Vocabulary Olympics, run by online vocabulary software company Language Perfect. The Vocabulary Olympics are a free event run in conjunction with International Languages Week.

Language Perfect co-founder Craig Smith is pleased with the interest students on both sides of the Tasman have shown in the competition.

“This year we had 28,501 students competing from 540 schools in New Zealand and Australia.” said Smith.

Over the three weeks of the competition the students spent a total of 31,000 hours answering over 16 million vocabulary questions in French, German, Japanese, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Maori.

“The process is very simple; the programme presents the student with a word in one of the seven languages taught using our programme. The student then translates that word into English. Three correct translations of the same word equals one point in the competition”

“The interest shown by students this year was amazing; in 2008 we had 8,000 students answering almost 4 million questions. This means that not only have the Vocabulary Olympics more than tripled in size, but those involved are answering more questions on average per person than they did last year.”

Competition for the title of top ranking school was fierce but was eventually claimed by Otago Girl’s High School who defended their title from 2008, with a whopping 295,483 points earned by 427 students. Second place was awarded to Hamilton Girl’s High School.

Perhaps the greatest success story of the competition was that of the third placed Gore High School. Although Gore High School had only 123 entered in the competition, they managed to score 152,620 points, with an average score per student of 1240, almost double the average of the winning school.

“It was a truly impressive effort from Gore High School. They put in a true team effort with every language student in the school participating. They deserve to be congratulated” said Smith.

The two highest individual achievements came from students at Middleton Grange School who both scored more than 30,000 points.

The Vocabulary Olympics prize giving will be held at Otago Girls High School in Dunedin at midday on Wednesday the 9th of September. Guest speakers include Dunedin Mayor Peter Chin and Adele Scott the President of the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers.

Language Perfect is a New Zealand company founded in 2007 by Craig and Shane Smith. In 2009 the company began an expansion across the Tasman in the first step towards taking their innovative product worldwide. Language Perfect’s software provides an online approach enabling students to improve their language skills outside the classroom environment. The software tracks areas of weakness for students, asking them questions more frequently in areas where they need improvement.

ENDS

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