English language speech contests are popular in Japanese junior and senior high schools, bringing prestige to winning students’ schools and aiding winners to gain admission to university (Nishikawa-Van Eester, 2009). As a result, students and teachers devote a great deal of effort practicing for these high-stakes contests. However, there has been very little research examining what motivates students, especially pre-university ones, to join speech contests or how students feel about their experience of participating. In this study, 25 high school and 73 junior high school speech contest participants completed anonymous surveys (including both Likert-type quantitative questions and qualitative open response questions) examining two areas. The first is the reasons students join speech contests (e.g., to win a prize), and the second is students’ overall experience of the contest itself (e.g., was it stressful?). In addition, 36 teachers of speech contest participants were asked why they felt their students joined the contests and their impressions of their students’ experiences in order to look for any differences between teacher impressions and the reported experiences of the students. The two surveys showed that both students and teachers felt the most important reason for students joining speech contests, in order of ranking, was a desire for personal growth, followed by self-expression, improving English communication skills, making social connections, and winning a prize. The fact that winning a prize was considered the least important reason to participate indicates that these students were primarily intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated to compete. Regarding the second question, the overall experience of participating in a speech contest was positive for students, with the majority enjoying the contest and wishing to repeat the experience. In addition, students reported feeling more confident in their public speaking as a result of participation, as well as having made improvements in their English communication abilities. The most surprising result is that students do not consider the experience to be stressful, although outside observers such as teachers may perceive that it was the opposite. Overall, we can conclude that speech contests are a generally positive experience with many benefits for students who participate, thus justifying the heavy time commitment involved for both students and teachers.
