We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lingua Speech Academy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lingua Speech below.

Lingua Speech, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.

A significant change that needs to be made to the educational system is to prioritize skills that prepare students for their future careers. Specifically, we believe that public speaking education needs to be incorporated into the curriculum. Effective communication skills, including public speaking, are essential for success in both personal and professional life.

Students should be given opportunities to practice and improve their speaking skills in a supportive environment. That’s exactly what we strive to do at Lingua Speech Academy by teaching the fundamentals of effective speaking, such as organization, body language, and storytelling. We believe that practicing verbal, written, and interpersonal skills will help students develop a well-rounded set of communication abilities.

We must remember that preparing students for a fulfilling life and career also involves equipping them with the ability to express their ideas and thoughts effectively and persuasively. By fostering communication skills, we can empower students to become confident, articulate individuals who are able to communicate their opinions and ideas clearly and effectively.

Lingua Speech, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are Lingua Speech Academy, a public speaking mentorship program for middle and high schoolers in the community. We started this initiative to make public speaking education more accessible in our surrounding areas. The three of us have been competing in debate for years now, and can positively attribute our growth and development as people to the confidence that public speaking has given us. Public speaking is an incredibly important skill that has not only made us comfortable taking part in interviews, speeches, and presentations, but will be life long skills in all types of communication. Unfortunately though, in the past couple of years, we noticed that public speaking and debate programs in our school district were getting massive budget cuts and were being restricted to the activities and tournaments that students were allowed to engage in. As debate students ourselves, this impacted us and our peers enormously. Due to the lack of opportunities for students to get involved in public speaking, the three of us wanted to create a space for kids to learn more and to help them gain confidence in this often scary field. To pursue this goal, we started holding week-long workshops for middle schoolers to introduce them to the fields of public speaking and competitive debate. Through these camps, we can work with kids and offer them the resources to become effective communicators. So far, we have worked with over 60 kids from 6th to 10th grade. Throughout these workshops, we teach critical communication skills, hold mini tournaments, play games, and grow kid’s confidence when presenting in front of others. We have also started speaking with local youth groups about the power of speaking up for your beliefs and are starting to extend our reach to elementary schools in the area. Our programs are far more accessible to local families than other debate camps due to the price. Competitive debate camps are a business, and it is hard to find a camp below 300 dollars per week, which excludes many low-income children from being able to gain experience in speech and debate. Our workshops are held for free or all priced affordably, and 100% of the money goes into donating supplies to local underfunded schools and food pantries. For example, we were able to donate over 75 pounds of food to our local food pantry due to our Thanksgiving workshop alone.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Throughout our entire competitive speech and debate career there was always one roadblock preventing us from being able to reach the national level, money. The speech and debate program was severely underfunded causing us to miss many tournaments that other schools could attend. It was due to this lack of competition that not only prevented us from realizing our potential but also dissuaded younger, novice debaters from participating in the program. In order to solve this, we created Lingua Speech Academy with the hope of introducing the speech and debate experience to these kids at a younger age and building their passion for the program.

Have you ever had to pivot?

A time when we had to pivot was during our first workshop. Our original mission statement was to prepare students for the competitive world of speech and debate. With all 3 of us coming from heavy debate backgrounds, our content was oriented towards teaching the different debate events such as Congressional Debate, Public Forum, and Extemporaneous Speaking. However, we realized during the workshop that middle schoolers weren’t ready for that just yet. Thus we changed our mission statement to giving kids the fundamental public speaking skills necessary to succeed. This shift in ideals was a great success as the kids were able to comprehend content better and effectively apply it to their speeches.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linguaspeech.wixsite.com/lingua
• Instagram: linguaspeechacademy