By Caoli
Special to the Tsinghua News Center
The Tsinghua Debating Team won the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) Championship at the 2007 World Universities Debating Championships (the WUDC), hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, December 28, 2006 - January 4, 2007.
The contest follows the British Parliamentary debating style. The EFL final draw was:
1st Prop: Tsuda A, Japan
1st Opp: Seikei A, Japan
2nd Prop: Tsinghua A, China
2nd Opp: ICU B, Japan
The Motion for the EFL final was: This House would lift (the) sanctions on Iran.
The two debaters representing Tsinghua were Duan Nan of the Department of Electronic Engineering and Guo Yan of School of Economics and Management. They came second in the 2006 National FLTRP Cup Debating Championship in Beijing last April and were therefore granted the opportunity to participate the 2007 WUDC. The tutor for both contests was Professor Cao Li, Department of Foreign Languages.
Tsinghua was the only team to break into the final among the five university teams from China. Since 1980, the WUDC has become an international event that hosts hundreds of participants from 150 universities. This year it hosted 334 teams from many universities across the world including a number of world famous universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Sydney, Harvard, Stanford, Tokyo and Hong Kong, etc.
The experience of participating in the World Championships will shed much light on the teaching and training of all-roundly cultivated students in one of the best universities in China.
