Past Paper 2016 Short Task

Good morning principal, teachers and students,

I’m the President of the Student Union, and it’s my pleasure to have a chance to give a speech to welcome you all on the first day of school today. I’m going to talk about the importance of following school rules as well as maintaining interpersonal relationships, in order to help our students achieve success and have an enjoyable school life.

To be frank, we all know that following school rules is really important, but why?

First and foremost, from the academic performance aspect, not following school rules may affect students’grades. For example, students who are not punctual may miss out on their learning. As a result, you will lag behind your study and school work. Also, if you fail to submit assignments on time, teachers cannot check your homework promptly, so you may not know how you did. Therefore, you’re not able to follow up with your learning. Missing important deadlines will literally make you lag behind your study and school work. The worst-case scenario is if you don’t follow school rules and have misbehaviours, you’ll be given a severe warning or suspension. During suspension, you’re not able to attend lessons regularly. After that, you may have to spend more time catching up with the syllabus and compensate for the times you stayed idle.

Additionally, from the learning environment aspect, not following school rules may lead to a poor learning environment. For instance, students who constantly talk in lessons may cause nuisance to other classmates. School is a place for students to study together and students usually have close bonding with each other. Thus, if the individual student frequently talks loudly at class, it can definitely affect the whole class study atmosphere. The classroom will become a marketplace which makes students extremely difficult to focus on their work. Also, it’s really important to study in a clean, comfortable place so that students can concentrate better. So please keep our school clean! By doing little things every day, such as throw rubbish away after you finish your meals, you are already helping to keep your school campus and classroom clean and pleasant.

Last but not least, in terms of your personal growth, following school rules can cultivate good character traits, like developing good time management, learning to become responsible or self-disciplined. As you know, school is a place for you to learn how the society works, so following school rules can help you gain higher adaptability in society and flexibility at work. Plus, school rules can help you build correct values and attitudes, training you to differentiate right from wrong.

Is it that following school rules is enough for us to achieve success? Not really. In fact, developing good interpersonal relationships is essential too.

To commence with, school is a place for us to meet and make friends. It’s an important factor that keeps our mental health strong since we all have study or exam pressure. In my opinion, sharing our difficulties with someone who’s trustworthy is a good way to release stress. Therefore, maintaining a healthy, vibrant relationship with others can actually help reduce your chance of being depressed. Also, being more outgoing and optimistic can help extend your social network. Mixing more with people of different ages and backgrounds can make you become more confident too.

In addition, maintaining good relationships with both teachers and classmates can definitely help enhance our personal growth. During communicating with them, we can learn a lot of social skills, for instance, learning to be more polite or showing empathy. As we know, we’ll get to meet people whom we have never met before when we enter the workforce. It’s of vital importance to be friendly and sociable so that you can survive in this harsh society and spread positive energy to people around you.

Teenagers like us may face a lot of difficulties and challenges. Nevertheless, you should pay heed to your behaviours and interpersonal relationships if you want to achieve success and have an enjoyable school life.

To conclude, secondary school life is precious and you should definitely cherish it. I also wish you an unforgettable school life in the coming few years of your learning journey. I really hope my sharing has given you some insight and inspiration. Thank you for your listening.