Te Matatini Festival

story
vocabulary

In the last two weeks, The Westpac Trust Stadium in Wellington has been hosting the Matatini Kapa Haka festival. Kapa Haka is the art of Māori cultural performance. For Te Matatini, adult Kapa Haka groups competed all around the country and finally, the best 1600 performers met in Wellington for the championships in waiata (choral singing) and haka (dance).

The festival is biennual; this means that it is held every two years. It is held in a different location each time. This year 60,000 people were expected to view the event.

In Wellington, the pedestrian crossing signals at intersections were changed to a woman doing action songs for the green “walk” signal, and a man doing a haka for the red “don’t walk” signal.

This year the winner of the grand championship was a group called Ngā Tūmanako, from Auckland.

The next Te Matatini festival will be in Auckland in 2021.

Vocabulary:

Stadium: a large building for sports games and concerts

location: place

expected: if you think that something will happen in the future, you expect it

action song: a song that also has hand signals to go with it

haka: a traditional Māori dance

5 thoughts on “Te Matatini Festival”

  1. Hi there

    I have been using your service since 2014. I am Vietnamese, and my English capability was just above zero when I came to New Zealand for the first time.

    My English skills are better than now, and I would like to raise a suggestion for your web
    1. Could you please increase the volume of time on the article? It means we currently have 1: 24 -minute article and it is great if you can take it up to 4 of 5 minutes.
    2. Can you divide the materials into three categories: basic, intermediate, and upper-intermediate. This division will help the learners to see how development they are.
    3. It is great if you put some grammatical points and word allocations under the article. It means a lot to the learners.

    Thank you for your patience to read my comments
    Benny

  2. Hi Melissa!

    It was great to read your article about Te Matatini, thanks. Just one small amendment: the festival is biennial (once every two years) not biannual (twice a year).

    Cheers!
    B.

  3. The fourth word of the first sentence, of the second paragraph, should be ” biennial “, rather than ” biannual ” which means half year or twice a year.

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