Building Crosscultural Friendship

Kakuta was transferred to Osaka Prefectural Senyo Senior High School last April. At the very first meeting for newcomers, he was asked to make a staff adviser to the ESS club. His predecessor had been transferred to another prefectural senior high school. Later at another meeting of English teachers there, he was told to “vitalize” (revitalize?) the club. It had just five members and two of them were leaving as they were in their 12th grade. The ESS’s club activities used to be held on Tuesdays. They had been watching DVDs, and talking about their contents. The first idea that hit Kakuta was to add variety to the ESS club activities: 1 Let’s Make Your Blog in English 2 Get Ready for EIKEN Interview Test 3 Enjoy English Conversations Kakuta started talking about his idea with the other staff adviser to the ESS club, who happens to be another newcomer English teacher. Blogs? Technically too difficult for our students to handle. Facebook? Too dangerous a place for our students to wander about. Pen-friends with e-mails? Matching our students with those abroad might be too bothersome. Finally, we came to a conclusion that we should use an aged system: a mailing list. Kakuta started searching for high schools abroad, or ,precisely speaking, for high school English teachers in foreign countries, who might get interested in having their students communicate with Japanese high school students. Kakuta first approached his friends. A Taiwanese friend of his, a geography teacher, instantly introduced him to her colleague English teacher in her high school. Native-English-speaker students might as well not be interested in just talking with Japanese students. Kakuta started looking for counterparts on LinkedIn, an SNS for “professionals”, where it is easier to find people with a certain occupation. Argentina, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greek, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Nicaragua, Thailand….. By the end of June, he had contacted more than 700 people in no less than 70 countries, and the project was to start tentatively in July and in full scale after summer holidays.