〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 2009.12. 18発行.No14（毎週金曜日発行）〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓
株式会社 セイガンスピーク メールマガジン
Sagan Speak Co., Ltd English Educational Newsletter
(このＨＴＭＬメールはインターネットに接続した状態でご覧下さい)
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このメールは、これまでの弊社とお名刺を交換させて戴いた学校関係者様にお送りしています。
〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 今 週 の Ｉ Ｎ Ｄ Ｅ Ｘ 〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓
１．気になる最近のニュース
２．弊社開発の新英語授業システム「リンクインシステム」のセミナー開催(その4)
３．弊社所属の外国人派遣講師による日本の英語教育への提言(その7)
４．スティーブン自叙伝(第９話・前号からの続き)
５．編集後記(メルマガ編集者らによる雑感コーナー)
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〓 １．気になる最近のニュース 〓
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高校生の内定率、急落５５．２％ 下げ幅過去最大
http://www.asahi.com/edu/news/TKY200912150401.html
カダフィ大佐、衛星通じ学生に持論 明大で対話集会
http://www.asahi.com/edu/news/TKY200912150395.html
子どもの体力、向上せず 小５・中２全国調査
http://www.asahi.com/edu/news/TKY200912170476.html
府立高に３９歳校長 「橋下知事の友人」教委に事前連絡
http://www.asahi.com/edu/news/OSK200912160057.html
高校無償化：特定扶養控除、縮減例を試算−−文科省
http://mainichi.jp/life/edu/archive/news/2009/12/20091217ddm003010114000c.html
国立大運営費交付金：教員ら、財務相らに増額要請
http://mainichi.jp/life/edu/archive/news/2009/12/20091218ddm002010059000c.html
海外向け英語放送赤字１億６３００万円…ＮＨＫ子会社
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/kyoiku/news/20091212-OYT8T00666.htm
教育長不在で越年へ…徳島
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/kyoiku/news/20091217-OYT8T00913.htm
都教委、小中教員増員へ「小１プロブレム」など対応
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/kyoiku/news/20091217-OYT8T00911.htm
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〓 ２．弊社開発の新英語授業システム「リンクインシステム」のセミナー開催(その4)〓
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
■去る１２月１４日、国際文化理容専門学校におきまして、弊社開発の新英語授業システム
「リンクインシステム」(特許出願中)に関するセミナーを開催いたしました。リンクインシ
ステムとは、簡単に言うと、日本人英語教師による通常の英語授業と、外国人英語講師によ
り番外編的に実施されていた英語授業とを結びつける(リンクさせる)ことで、お互いの授業
が有機的に関連させ、よりこれまで以上の効果と結果を生徒にもたらすという授業システム
です。具体的には、日本人教師が教科書を使って教えた英語授業の内容(読解・文法等)をそ
の後に行われる外国人講師による全編英語の授業において、展開・発展、堀下げていくとい
うものです。当然、生徒にとっては反復的・復習的効果がもたらされますので、両授業のリ
ンクの有無で外国人講師の授業の効果が一変します。せっかく、費用をかけてまで採用して
いる外国人講師の存在です。一週間の中で限られた英語授業の時間数という有限資源を有効
的に活用すべきではないでしょうか？今回のセミナーは、実際に、外国人講師によるリンク
インシステムのメッソドの一部を用いた英語授業を参観していただくという内容でした。
月曜１２時２０分からの授業にも関わらず、ご多忙の中、各学校関係者様方にご参加いただ
きまして、この場をお借りして厚く御礼申し上げます。そこで、今回も先週に引き続き、
セミナー参加者様から頂いたご質問をご紹介いたします。
●ご質問その６
「リンクインテキストのサンプルを頂けますか？」
弊社側回答→「リンクインシステムは学校の事情や使用する教科書、さらには学校様との
打ち合わせ等を通じて、学校専用にカスタマイズされます。したがって、リンクインシステ
ムは導入する学校によってそれぞれ異なりますし、テキストも当然異なってくることになり
ます。弊社としましては、リンクインテキストのサンプルを配布して理解を頂くというより
も、むしろ、今回のようなセミナーへのご参加後に、ご要請に応じて学校様へ個別訪問して
弊社とのディスカッションを通して、弊社の方から学校様のご要望等を反映したリンクイン
テキストの試作をご提示させて頂く方が適切だと考えております。リンクインシステムのお
けるテキストとは、コンポーネントの中の単なる一部でしかなく、あくまでも、コンポーネ
ント全体あってこそシステムが機能されます。お尋ねのサンプルのご希望のご趣旨は、セミ
ナーのご参加いただけなかった貴校の他の先生方へのご説明や学校様内部での検討会にご利
用になられるためと推察いたします。そこで、もしも弊社を学校様へお招きいただければ、
他の先生方に対して具体的なご説明を弊社から致しますので是非、詳細説明の機会を頂きた
く存じます。
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〓３．弊社所属の外国人派遣講師による日本の英語教育への提言(その７) 〓
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■今週も弊社の派遣講師Angela Stark(アンジェラ・ストーク)による、彼女の経験を通した
日本の英語教育への提言です。
With winter vacation nearly upon us, I’ve been reflecting on the experiences
and people I’ve encountered in the places to which I've traveled on previous
vacations. The more memorable moments include: singing with new friends until
dawn in the living room of an abandoned Irish countryside mansion, laughing with
school children as our bus driver swerved through the curves of the Yangmingshan
Mountains, watching innovative play performed in the tunnels under the London
Underground, getting food poisoning in Sevilla during a summer heat wave, and
watching a painted elephant weave through street traffic in Bangkok.
Every trip includes some element that I haven’t planned for: stomach problems,
unreliable transportation, my travel partner’s wallet being stolen, and so on.
However, the good nearly always outweighs the bad, and in fact there's some good
to be found in the bad, as well; there's the joy of having survived, and with a
story to tell!
My ten day trip to Taiwan two summers ago involved a pretty serious disaster,
but I came out of it unscathed and smiling.
By the sixth day of
my trip, I had worked my way from
coast all the way to the southern beach town of Kending (also spelled Kenting).
I arrived in the late afternoon, and the NTD (New Taiwanese Dollars) I had
exchanged at the airport were running low; I didn’t have enough cash for a
room. I eventually found a hotel that would take my debit card as payment
and booked a room for two nights. I then headed out to get some cash and
dinner.
I put my card into
the ATM at one of the many
and punched in my code on the keypad. 3140? 3160? 3640? I hadn’t used my
American bank account in many months, and couldn’t quite remember the PIN number.
Every code I tried seemed to be wrong.
Hmmm. This could be a serious problem.
I went to the counter and asked the clerk if she could use my card as a
credit card to pay for groceries. She politely explained that they don’t
do that in Taiwan, and suggested I use the ATM. I tried to explain my
predicament, and she directed me to a girl out front selling t-shirts, who
spoke more English. The girl out front then called her sister—who spoke even
better English—and handed the phone to me. The sister suggested I call my bank.
Right. Why didn’t I think of that? There was only one problem: I didn’t
have enough cash left to buy an international phone card. The t-shirt seller
came to my rescue, and loaned me what I needed.
When I finally got the bank on the phone, they told me their system was
down, and I should call back in an hour. Then when I called the second time,
they informed me that they could not access my PIN number; all they could do
was mail a new code to my American address in a few days, which wasn’t going
to help me at all. I was thankful for my bank's desire to keep my account
information secure, but I was also very hungry, tired, and stuck in a small
coastal town with tears on my cheeks and zero NTD. At a loss, I tried the ATM
one more time. It decided I obviously didn’t know my PIN number, and
refused to return the card. Things just kept looking worse.
The situation wasn’t completely hopeless, however; I had 14,000 yen in
cash. Unfortunately it was a Friday evening, meaning the banks wouldn’t be
open for a couple of days. The girls at the t-shirt stand saw my predicament.
They made some phone calls, found out what the current exchange rate was, and
changed part of my cash for me—at a better rate than I'd received at the airport!
I thanked them profusely, paid them back for the phone card, bought some dinner,
and headed back to my room to eat and draw up a budget for the rest of my trip. A
day and a half later I took a bus to the city of Kaohsiung and exchanged my last
10,000 yen at a bank. At the train station, I met a lovely Australian backpacker
who let me stay in her spare bedroom in Tainan and gave me advice about what to
see in town. The next night, my Japanese host sister and her Taiwanese family took
me to dinner at the street stalls (where I was able to watch a man skin a live
snake, and then eat it the snake meat he prepared in soup with ginger—but that’s
another story). I can't imagine my trip without the help of the girls in Kending,
the Australian on the train, and my host sister's family.
Of course, I could have easily called the States and asked my parents to wire
me some money, but I'm too stubborn and independent for that. Instead, I made the
tight budget part of my adventure. The purpose of traveling, after all, is to
experience a new place. I want to get the feel of an area by walking the same
streets as the locals, by visiting grocery stores and city parks. Of course I'm
interested in classical architecture and history museums, but aimless wandering
is where you find the real magic. It's the laughing old men belting out karaoke
in a small bar next to a dilapidated cemetery while you're getting sunburned trying
to find the bus stop. It's the dragon parade found on a side street, the cages of
exotic birds lined up on the sidewalk, the shopkeepers dozing in the summer sun.
Perhaps most importantly, it's the kindness of the people you meet along the
way.
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〓 ４．スティーブン自叙伝(第９話・前号からの続き) 〓
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
■以下は、本メルマガに連載形式にて好評掲載中の弊社 スティーブン・オーストウィック
の前半生です。今回も前回からの続きとなります。
Sending Out A
Search Party - continued
We finally arrived at our
destination, we had had one or two little mishaps since the
encounter
with Gibbo and his gang, but this time nature was the one dishing out the
pain
and strangely enough providing the remedy to ease the pain. I had walked a bit
too
close to the side of the dyke and got nettled quite badly on my legs, if you
have ever
been
nettled then you will know that you get a lot of very itchy and painful white
swellings
on your skin and it really is uncomfortable. Dock leaves are usually ten a
penny
and easy to find at the edge of the dyke and all you need to do is scrunch up
one
to
get the leaf to part with its juice and then rub it onto your skin – that is exactly what
I did
and relief followed pretty quickly after that. My mate Mark managed to get stung
by a
hornet, the king of the wasp family, I saw the thing land and try to deposit
its venom
into
his bare arm. Mark actually knocked
the hornet away before it could deposit its
stinger
and luckily we were able to pull the stinger out with our fingers. The magic
dock
leaf juice was then applied to the sting which I don’t think is nature’s remedy,
but
at the time we thought that if it is good for nettle rashes it must be good for
hornet
stings
– to be fair I think psychology
was the true remedy on that day.
We were now in a farmer’s field in Airmyn, our final
destination, not just any old field,
but a
field that we had traditionally made our field. It had taken well over 4 hours to get
there,
but were had finally made it. We
made it our field because it had so many
hedgerows
that formed secret hiding places in the bottoms of the surrounding dykes so
for
playing hide and seek and hounds and hares it was perfect. There were also turnips in
the
field that we could take and cook.
It was also near to a big apple orchard, from which
we
would raid apples from, there was never any chance of getting caught raiding
apples
because
it was very big and not well taken care of, it almost looked like the apples
were
growing
wild but they were not, they were definitely cultivated and I have to say very
very
tasty. The apple orchard belonged
to John Smith’s
Brewery, I think the brewery
planted
the apple trees with visions of making their own cider, but these plans were
scrapped
and the apples were never ever picked.
This was a great place to play, climbing
trees
and picking apples without having dogs barking at you or people telling you to
get
out
or they will call the police, total and blissful fun and entertainment. We were all
feeling
a bit hungry, our brambles had been stolen and all we had to eat was some
apples
we
could raid, some potatoes my mate Mike’s mum had given him and a turnip that we
could
pluck from the field. Making a fire
was always a task in itself. Mike
and Mark
were
cub scouts and they were well versed with rubbing sticks together to make fire,
it did
eventually
work, but it used to take a long time.
The other challenging thing was trying
to
find something we could cook our potatoes, green beans, carrots, turnips and
vegetable
soup
in, which my mate Adi eventually came across. Adi found an old pan in the apple
orchard
that we cleaned using dyke water,
the dyke water was clear, so we thought that
as
long as we heated it up it would kill all bacteria, that was the theory. We plucked our
turnip
out of the ground and together with the other vegetables we washed them and
then
used
our penknives to peel and chop them up, Adi got his Swiss army knife out to
open the
can
of soup and were then ready to start cooking, all the vegetable were in the pan
with the
soup
and all we needed was a fire. Mike
and Mark were still trying to get their sticks to
create
friction, but were having difficulty, their palms were looking very sore so we
all
chipped
in with the rubbing part. The
tinder finally caught fire and we away, we put the
pan
directly onto the fire and hoped for the best. We found a lid off an old tin so we put
that
on
top of the pan to help our food cook and also to keep out the burnt embers that
were
flying
around. My job was to look after
the food while the others went off to collect the
dessert
which was going to be stewed apples.
I was really looking forward to eating the food
and
then playing in the field, and as I waited for the others to return, I thought
how lucky
we
were to live in the country, I could not imagine living in a town, sure they
had cinemas
and the like, but we had fresh air, lots of god’s clean fresh air and was satisfied.
To be continued.
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〓 ５．編集後記(メルマガ編集者らによる雑感コーナー) 〓
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■日本で新型インフルエンザの流行が始まったころ、お隣の韓国ではキムチを食べているか
ら発生が少ないとの研究結果が報道されていたそうです。しかし、その後、韓国での感染
が報じられ、被害も拡大、現在では死者も１００人を超えております。こうした中、中国で
はニンニクがインフルエンザには有効との風説が流れていたため、ニンニクの価格が暴騰し、
今でも市場混乱の余韻に悩まされているそうです。先般の納豆騒動もそうでしたが、人は、
「身近なモノが持つ意外な効力」という話題に弱いのでしょうか？
■現在、私立大学入学者の半数以上が推薦・ＡＯ入試の合格者を占めるに至っています。
もはや一般入試組を逆転している訳ですが、ここで指摘されているのが、彼らの学力不足で
す。小論文と面接に合格し入学した後、「英文科なのに英語の長文が理解できない」、
「日本文学専攻なのに古文の基礎的単語を知らない」。そのため次第に教室から遠のき、
留年の後に結局中退・・・・こうした傾向を鑑みて、文科省も今年の３月から
「筆記試験の併用」を各大学へ通知する一方で、大学側の方も入学前教育を生徒に課してい
ます。この教育プログラムを予備校や我々のような教育産業にかかわる業者が約１/４を請け
負わせていただいていることは、我々にとって光栄なことですが、受験者が全入する時代に
際して、大学教育に必要な「学力」が中学高校の段階で問われていると思います。
■先日、東京ビッグサイトで３日間開催された「エコ・プロダクツ２００９」に行ってきま
した。省エネ商品・企業のエコ研究やその取り組みへの関心が高かったのか、とにかく会場
は込み合っていました。ちなみに、私の興味を引いたエコプロダクツは、
「土に埋めると分解するスーツ(コナカ)」、「金具針が不要なホチキス(コクヨ)」、
「電気のいらない加湿器(宮地楽器)」、「段ボールでできた家具(ヴァズインク)」、
「勝手にインクジェットプリンターのインクを節約印刷してくれるソフト
(Toner Cuter Ver2)」でした。こうした環境対策に取り組む企業はもちろんのこと、みずほ
銀行、東京三菱銀行、日本郵便、ベネッセ、ＳＡＰＩＸまでもが、エコ企業として出店して
たのは驚きでした。主催者によれば、環境に関して危機意識の高い参加者が３日間で延べ
１８万人超えたとのことです。それにしても、会場を一周りするだけで、出店企業の利己的
な宣伝によって無理やり手渡される膨大な量のチラシ・パンフレット・紙袋には困惑させら
れました。これらが会場の出口や最寄り駅で膨大な量のゴミに変わっていたことは何とも
皮肉でした。好評につき来年も開催するらしいのですが、次回は、企業の「エゴ」と
参加者の「エコ」が調和した内容となること切望して止みません。
〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓
本メールは、株式会社セイガンスピークより発信しております。
東京都品川区西大井６丁目２４番１４号第５下川ビル２階
株式会社セイガンスピーク アルファベンディ事業部
電 話 ０３-５４９３-８１９３
F A X ０３-５４９３-８１９１