From the readings for Oct. 22

What is interesting to me in Johnson’s chapter is Table 3 (p. 137), which reminds me that I once tried to conduct keypal project with the help of my friend in Minnesota. My friend was working at a middle school as a social worker. She asked me if my students are interested in exchange messages about culture via e-mail in English since her students were not Japanese language learners (As I mentioned in one of the previous postings, we ended up with not conducting this project.). I realized that this project would have been very unique because according to Table 3 in this chapter, English (send)-English (receive) would not give any advantage to my friends students. However, they wanted to learn culture rather than language. They would take some advantage of it if we tried. This thought makes me think if it is possible to find some non-language classes in English-speaking country which are interested in foreign cultures. If we can conduct keypal project with these classes, my students can fully utilize the opportunities.

Furthermore, of the four choices of Table 3, I prefer to use the first one (Spanish-Spanish) and the fourth one (English-English) while taking turns. In that way, they will be able to understand both places (feeling of talking to novice speaker as a native Japanese speaker and feeling of talking to native speaker as a novice English speaker.), which really helps them to learn the attitude toward foreign language communication.