Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi from Japan,

My Name is Tomoko Nozawa and I am currently teaching English at four different universities in Tokyo area.

It was nearly ten years ago when I visited this site. since then, I've visited here several times. And now, I came here and got surprised to see this nice looking forum for teachers. I should have come back more often. Thank you, EFL Cafe! Thank you Mr. David Sperling! Long time ago, I exchanged messages with you!

OK, now, I would like to find partner classes for the coming spring semester starting in the middle of April. As EFL learners, my students have had very few chances to use English and the English level is lower intermediate or egven lower even after at least 6 years of English study at school prior to college.

The theme for the new academic year is "How can we make more peaceful world?" The students are supposed to come up with their own issues to reseach. Through the course, they will research and discuss on the discussion board, and in the end, they will write a term paper and make a presentation.

And on the discussion board, we would like to have people with various background to discuss the issues together.

When we have this kind of discussion board, we need to have some common platform. I used Nicenet Internet Class Assistant in the last semester which is very easy and simple offered by an NPO for free. I wonder if you know and like it.

Here is the url of Nicenet: http://www.nicenet.org/
You can create your own class discussion boards there.

I know there are more sophisticated discussion board creating tool, but I have used only this one, Nicenet. If you woud like to use your own choice of the discussion board, let me know.

The time frame is the problem for the Japanese schools especially the spring semester here, starting in April and will end in July. We may be able to have only a few exchanges for the spring semester. However, I am always avaiable for this kind of discussion. boards For the fall semester, the time frame can be from the end of Spetember to the middle of December.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for reading my lengthy post.

Cheers,

Tomoko

Oops,

Sorry for calling this site EFL Cafe and calling you, the manager, David. You can tell that I am in EFL situation.

Cheers to Dave's ESL Cafe

Tomoko

Hello Tomoko,

I've just started to use "nicenet", and it seems to go down reasonably well with my students - Austrian engineering students aged 15 to 20.

They are very reluctant to post there, though.

Maybe it would be an incentive to them to read the posts of other learners, who're not quite as perfect as they imagine them to be, either.

I've got one student in particular, a 19-year-old boy who's fascinated by everything Japanese and who intends to study Japanese language and literature at university next year.

The discussion topic that you propose is definitely interesting, I think. Well, maybe we can link up. My e-mail address is [email protected]

Thanks for your efforts here, Eva

Hi there

I have 100 students from the university in Fujian like to meet the keypals )

Please contact me at: [email protected]

Thanks

Yadang