I am John Rucynski, an English as a Foreign Language Teacher at Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. This blog is a summary of the results of an e-mail exchange between my Japanese students and a group of high school and university students in my home country of the US. The US students span the country from California to Arizona to upstate New York.
I started this project because I was sick of boring English coursebooks giving generalized and uninspiring tidbits of information about people from different cultures. I prefer my students to have real communication with native speakers of English. Since there is a lack of native speakers for them to communicate with here and the internet is a great way to meet and communicate with people from around the world, I thought a simple solution was for them to find e-mail partners.
There are of course still a lot of generalizations about the US in Japan, and vice versa. I wanted to give my students and the students in the US a chance to explore more and get beneath the surface. I asked each group to come up with a topic that interested them and make a list of questions they would like to ask an American student. Before sending their e-mail, they had to write down their predictions of what the answers would be, based on their images of American society.
Some groups had their images changed quite a bit, while others hardly at all. That is not the main point. The main point is that everyone involved hopefully learned at least a little more about a foreign culture. And that is always exciting and rewarding.
# posted by Johninjapan @ 6:07 AM
