By Atasha Gabrielle P. Vito, BA-ELS 4, The Centralian Link Intern

This is the morning session of the Ars Verba event, which features career and research consultations.

On April 6, 2026, in the fifth floor of the Senior High School building, in the audiovisual room, CPU English Language Society held their English Day celebration called the Ars Verba: Celebrating the Art of Languages. They invited students from first to fourth years, teachers, and guests to appreciate the English language and literature as a whole. At the same time, English Language Studies students mingled with each other while getting ideas for their future in the course.

The morning session included the opening remarks from College of Arts and Sciences Dean Stella G. Fernandez, who welcomed the English Language Studies students. The department head of the Department of Languages, Mass Communication, and Humanities Dr. Annalee Cocjin also shared how the organization shared ideas about the events. There was also a consultation for research, giving the students ideas on how to write their theses. What followed was the career counseling since the course is a versatile course.

At the end of the morning session, there was a linguistics quiz bee that tested the students’ knowledge about linguistics and their following branches. It is also to see if they studied or remembered the lessons that the teachers taught them. It was a way to honor our DLMCH teachers, given their hard work in teaching students about linguistics.

Students were dressed as their favorite fictional characters from different media, such as books, movies, and even video games. The examples of these characters were Alice from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Doraemon from Japanese animated series Doraemon. However, some of their outfits are rather inspired by these characters than a complete cosplay. Some introduced themselves, answering their reasons why they entered the English Language Studies course while telling others about the characters they were dressed up as.

The afternoon session included games to play and some merchandise to sell, giving the English Language Studies students an afternoon of fun despite the heat index that pushed most classes to later schedules. Some students were led to the other room to join another portion of the program while some stayed in the audiovisual room to compete in another game.

One of those games was the literature quiz bee, where the competitors’ knowledge about literature and literary works were tested. Another topic in the quiz is about literary writing, specifically about literary genres and the parts of a short story.. Meanwhile, in the other room, the other students played a spelling bee fused with a Chinese garter game. Students have to jump over the garter while saying one letter to spell out the word that the game masters requested.

The program concluded with a literary debate, where students had a debate over their favorite characters across different media. It is also for students who are fond of literary analyses. One of the debates included the topic of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein if the monster’s murder of the Frankenstein family was justified because he was created ugly.

One of the most memorable portions of the program was the All the Words I Never Said, where students were given pads. They could write whatever they thought about the course. Some also wrote inspiring messages, giving other English Language Studies students some inspiration in their future.

This program goes to show that fluency in English could give one so many opportunities; They may excel in the technical part by becoming a linguist while some could use the creative part of that fluency by becoming writers and artists. It reminded us that language is a media of communication and that media is also a means to do art; All we need to believe in the art it inspires out of others – whether through learning linguistics or writing pieces.