Seventeen-year-old Shannon Couper will be taking to stages throughout China after winning a prestigious Mandarin language speech competition.
The Tauranga Girls' College student was first equal in the national Chinese Bridge Speech Competition on May 17 run by the Confucius Institute, an organisation that promotes artistic, cultural and intellectual exchange between China and New Zealand.
She and another student from Auckland will be travelling to Beijing sometime in October to represent New Zealand in the international Chinese speech competition. "We arrive first in Beijing then we go on a tour through major Chinese cities competing in different locations. It's a massive travelling journey. I'll be there for 17 days. For the tertiary students in the competition, camera crews follow them around everywhere and it becomes a massive TV show like American Idol."
Shannon lived in China from when she was 2-years-old until she was 12, but as she grew up in a foreign community and went to an American system school, she only learned the bare basics of the language before she returned to New Zealand.
For the first few years at college, Shannon had been learning Mandarin through correspondence but now was helped out by the Chinese Community School, based at the college.