The English Language Carnival (ELCA) is an annual event aimed to provide Higher Education students the opportunities to use English outside the classrooms and motivate them to enhance their English competency and skills.
Above is the official poster.
This year, UTM has the honor of hosting ELCA 2020 virtually from 1st of December until 10th of December which is the very first time it’s going fully online since the carnival was first organised in 2017 amidst the global Covid-19 pandemic and the economic downturn. 297 students from 17 public universities in Malaysia participated in this programme. The host, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) sent nineteen students to participate in HE-ELCA 2020, an increased number compared to last year’s participation. As the carnival was carried out online, (elca2020.tv) became the official ‘venue’ for the participants and the trainers to access and explore all of the carnival details and guidelines.
Apart from the HE-ELCA official website (https://elca2020.tv), students were also connect edthrough the media social like Facebook Page, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp and Tiktok. All these mediums help them to level up their English proficiency outside the classrooms and motivate them to enhance their English competency.
The participants involved in various virtual English language activities, games, and competitions such as ELCA Today, Respawn, Soundscape, Acting challenge, and Connected Creativity. Our UTM team has won third place in Respawn ( an instance of a character in a video game reappearing after having been killed) and second place for ELCA Today.
Mentioned below were some of the activities we had :
Respawn activity. This activity was in the form of pre-recorded video commentary of a video game play that challenged the participants’ ability to add the interactive element to the game.
Connected Creativity. This was a total physical response (TPR) activity to get participants to coordinate and act online.
Acting Challenge. The Acting Challenge used the duet feature in Tik Tok to create an acting duet video. For this challenge, a participant was required to place two videos, side by side, so that one video responded to the other and the students did very well on this.
Above were some of the tutorials and guidelines for the students to follow during the competition. They were able to get all the guidelines and tutorials on the website.
These achievements shown any that our participants have the potential to improve their skills and talents for upcoming events on using English .
As for the feedback, the participants gave good reviews and positive reactions towards the carnival eventhough it was held fully online for the first time where some of them experienced technical constraints. Overall, the carnival went smoothly until the closing ceremony day and the participants really enjoyed the virtual learning sessions in this program.
Below are all the photos from behind the scene (BTS) :
We hope that online carnival will strive in the future and we as the host, are proud to be pioneers for such a delightful event. We took this as a challenge to be the benchmark and point of reference for fellow universities in organizing such virtual events in the future.
Authors: Muhammad Amir Hussein Bin Ramzan & Damia ‘Aliah Binti Rohaizad