What's New at Kyoto NHK ESS?

Dear ESS members,

Today’s practice is 　“ How to improve our Japanese style school days’ English.”
I’ve got a book written by Mr. David Sein. He said that Japanese school English is quite uncommon. Those expressions are hardly used their daily conversations.
We should consider our school days’ English and correct them.
Eg; “　What time is it now?　” (今は何どきでござるか)　ジョン万次郎時代の英語
1) I divide us with 6 groups.
2) Each group select a chairperson.
3) Talk about the contents of the paper.
4) Correct our Japanese school days’ style expressions.

By Takeo Kuchinaka

Dear ESS members,

This is Masayama writing.
I’m writing this to inform you of the second half practice scheduled on Nov. 19th.

Genre: game
Title: “Find the word”
Purpose: Vocabulary building & composition ability training

1. Preparation for the game
All of you will be divided into two teams. Each team has to make a waiting list to decide one’s turn in order to provide a quiz for their other team members. Each presenter of the quiz will have only one minute to get a correct answer from their team members.

2. Outline of the game:
We are trying to play a kind of word association game like the 連想ゲーム. I prepared three large envelopes in which have 120 cards of word classified into three levels according to the degrees of difficulty to acquire. On each card it has a word in English, core definitions of the word in Japanese and a score you will get when the correct answer is responded. All the scores and definitions were are brought in the cards from the Weblio English-Japanese Dictionary.

In order to kick off the game, if you are the first presenter of the quiz, you will have to come up on stage: in the front of the learning room; to pick up a card in a the large envelope you chose, then you have to explain the word in other English words to your team members as in an easy way as possible so that they can give you a correct answer soon. I hope you will explain it in a sentence or sentences form as perfect as you can. For example, this is an adjective which means “domestic”, but it is sometimes used for describing not beautiful person, because most many people hesitate to say this “ugly” to one’s face, The answer is “homely”.

As I wrote earlier, each envelope has a different level of word cards. So if you choose the envelope labeled “Easy”, it will be easy for you to get a correct answer from your teammate, but you would get only 1 to 5 points even if the quiz was correctly answered. On the other hand, if you choose the envelope labeled “difficult”, you might get 11 points or over. The choice is yours! If you want your team to win on the competition, I recommend you to choose the envelope labeled “difficult” as many times as possible. Every member of the teams will be given a chance to present the quiz at fewest. I’m looking forward to seeing the competition to be a close match!!

I hope you will be engrossed in this game. See you soon!

K. Masayama

[Genre: ] Talking / Discussion
[Theme: ] Oh! Trump wins.

After making some groups, let's talk about the following topics.

a) Did the result surprise you, or, not? Did you predict Trump's victory? Did you believe Clinton's win? Why, or, why not?

b) Why did not votes to Clinton grow? Why could Trump get support from the majority in the U.S?

c) Many mass media seemed to miss the forecast. Why?

d) Do you know mass media or critics, who successfully predict the election's result?

e) Do you support Trump, or Clinton? Why?

f) Do you think that the relationship between the U.S and Japan is expected to be largely changed with Trump's administration? Why, or, why not?
(e.g. National security, economy including TPP, power balance of Asia, etc.)

g) Is the birth of Trump administration good news or bad news for Japan?

h) Do you think Trump can do his pledges? (I will offer the list of his pledges in the practice).

After finishing the discussion, a representative of each group is expected to make a short presentation for all members, within the last fifteen minutes.

I hope all of you can enjoy

Murota.

Dear Kyoto ESS members,

Let me introduce the contents of the upcoming practice on December 3rd.

[Genre: ] Discussion
[Theme: ] 2 short articles, see below
1. Happiness Increases with Age, Study Says 
2. Japanese Schools to Adopt Computer Programming Education

[Outline:]
Program summary
Make several groups. And choose MC and/or presenter in your group. There are 2 topics below. Please read and discuss within your group. Each topics includes discussion points. After the discussion, a presenter summarize and introduce discussion of your group within 3 minutes.

Time table
17:40-18:30
Reading and discussion
18:30-18:40
Presentation

 I hope you have enjoyable time. 
See you at the temple.

H Ishizaki