The clip above I guess was the most popular one around the world yesterday. After watching it, I must say this is an emotional speech that echoes through the ages.
According to the Guardian, In a stinging speech on Monday, the teenage Swedish climate activist told governments that “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” a visibly emotional Thunberg said.
“The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”
Perhaps this is my intuition that why so many of us fail to do a successful English speech even once in a lifetime is rote-learning. No matter what sort of exams students have sit, it seems the only strategy every young learner counts on is cramming for exams in which we are so used to mechanically memorising all the keys to conquer tests. As a result, we probably find ourselves useless when coping with an oral test that demands versatile of employing a foreign language such as English, French or Spanish.
Being a linguistic educator, I feel very pity that many of my students I've ever taught made use of rote-learning all the time as developing language proficiency. Some of them are even proud of such a panacea which, they deeply believe, is the symbol of their talent, because they perhaps believe that nobody else but only themselves can discover such a cunning trick to achieve goals.
Please watch the short video above and listen carefully to all the words she says in spite of her Swedish accent. Don't you think hers sounds memoried as you are used to doing?