International Video Conferencing with a Japanese AE E-Teacher Alumnus

Learning about Japanese culture through English with a Skype session

For today's International Cultural Exchange class, we had a good time learning about Japanese culture, with Toshi introducing Tokyo, anime, his trip to Taichung, and so on. 

Toshi and I first met at an international English teaching seminar by AE E-Teacher in Seoul back in 2014. Two years later, I showed him around Taichung while he was traveling in Taiwan. Since then, we've conducted a few Skype sessions for our students to experience real applications using English to introduce themselves and their schools.  

Those seventh graders had limited vocabulary words and sentence patterns, but they still managed to ask simple questions in English. On top of that, some of them even tried to do so in Japanese. Of all the topics Toshi shared, they responded most enthusiastically to anime characters and theme songs. 

As Toshi mentioned that Taiwan helped a lot with the earthquake and tsunami relief of 2011, we also agreed that Japan had been our most important ally in Asia. I will also be looking forward to more future collaborations like this in the future, for both Toshi and I will be teaching in the same grade.