Our names are Ya-san, Kenji, Ya-chan, and Aya. We are students at Kwansei Gakuin University, which is located in Nishinomiya, Japan, between Osaka and Kobe. We are now taking a course in Intermediate English in the Intensive English Program. We study English because we would like to speak English very well so that we can communicate with people from many different countries. For this class, we had to choose a topic about something we wanted to know more about American culture or American student life. We then had to interview an American student about this topic and compare our image with their answers. Our partner was Deirdre, who is an elementary education major at SUNY-Oswego. The topic we chose was American school life. We chose this topic because all of the members in our group are interested in American school life and we wanted to know the differences between the US and Japan.
The answers we got from our partner changed our image about the US somewhat. On a scale from 1 to 5, if 1 means it didn’t change our image at all and 5 means it changed our image of the US on this topic, we would say the number 3. The most surprising answer we got from our partner was that she used to party almost seven days a week in the bars in her town!
By exchanging email with an American student, we could also learn some new things about American society. The most interesting piece of information we got from our partner was that she was eating a lot of fatty foods and not getting enough fruits and vegetables, but then she realized how bad the foods were and changed her eating habits.
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are suntan, which means to make your skin darker by laying in the sun.
We would like to thank our partner for taking the time to help us with this assignment. We also hope they can visit Japan someday and learn more about Japanese culture.
# posted by Johninjapan @ 6:43 AM
