Our names are Kenji, Keiko, Eri, and Shun. 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 want to communicate more and more fluently with people from foreign 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 Katy, who is a writing arts major at SUNY-Oswego. The topic we chose was future dreams. We chose this topic because Japanese students usually enter university without specific dreams, so we wanted to know the case in the US.
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 the situation in the US is similar to Japan, as students there often enter university without specific dreams either.
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 compared with Japanese companies, American companies allow quite a lot of student interns to work for them.
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are pediatrician, which means a doctor which takes cares of babies or infants; oriented (towards), which means has the purpose of something, and SUNY, which stands for the State University of New York.
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 @ 6:20 AM
