Oral Presentation

We all have completed of our oral presentation last week. I really worried about that if I can speech well in front of the EBP members and ...all of our TEACHERS!

What I most focused on my preparation was simply practice of speaking. From the experience of the lecture report, I knew all the key to keep attention for all of the things while in the presentation is to avoid becoming too nervous. So I tried to rehearse of the speech as possible as I can. Then I made cards carefully to keep reminding the timing of change the slides.

When I started my presention, I was not so nervous as I thought but still I felt like the time was flying away (as shorter than it really was). I tried to keep looking at the audience all the time (that is I could not do at last presentation), but because I still filled with the thought to what to speak so I looked at the PC display (where my slides was shown on) much of the time.

Overall, I felt it was much better than the last one, but I think there are still many things to improve my speech.

Fuculty Report Presentation

When I watched myself in the video, I got a shock that it was worse than I expected before -I was too upset.
I totally forgot the most important thing during that time; I did not look to the audience at all.

What I was surprised is it took over 6mins for my presentation despite I was worried that was too short, less than 5mins. I really did not feel that I talked that long. So I learned that when I am nervous I cannot rely on my time sensation. In addition, I did not realized that I touched my hair many time. I should keep attention to it too.

I think I have to have a lot of practice and change many things by my IRP Oral Presentation. What I have to pay attention to are:
- Eye contact
- Time management
- Well preparation
- Keep my confident
- Do not touch my hair
(Oh no, there are too many things...)

I was not satisfied almost all the things of my presentation last time, but the voice volume was ok. I will keep it to the next time.

What I most have to work hard on is TRAINING WELL prior the presentation. When I am sure about my work I would be able to proud of my work.

learning is neverending...

Of course we are learning English, but the most difficult thing now I am dealing with is time management. I know it is just a basic but really annoying me. I always feel there is not enough time, sometimes even sigh in the morning of the deadline day for an assignment. There are a lot of things what I need; improve pronunciation, shorten constructing time of writing, gain vocabularies, etc. But to get all in a short range of time, it is really necessary to manage to distribute time for each task. So far, I am really not satisfied with that skill.

All my stresses come from the same reason. Why is there only 24 hrs in a day? The skills I have to get in this course seem to take forever to learn.
That is my biggest distress now.

However, I already knew this fact because that I have been fighting with this problem since I was working in my country. The situation in a study is not far different from a job. It is like a short-term project job. When work for a project, it is effective to make a structure, like this(link). It is not necessary for making such a huge thing but showing all the tasks and making a priority would work very efficient. I will try for make them well.

IRP questions

My IRP topic is global digital divide in India, which focuses on accessibility of the Internet. Before writing my question, I would like to mention about the definition of “Global digital divide”. According to the background reading(link), it is distinguishable from “digital divide”, which means the gap of accessibility to information due to the coverage of IT infrastructure between urban and rural (originally in the US). In contrast, “global digital divide” means the gap between developed country(s) and developing country(s). My consideration about the situation in India is, In spite of being one of IT advanced countries in the world, that there are huge gap between people caused from several inequalities of education, income and social status. My questions in this research are; how the situation is complicated in this country, can it be an effective solution advancing the Internet accessibility in this county and can it upgrade the IT status of this county against the world. So I will deal with both aspects of “Global digital divide” and “digital divide (in India)” in this research.

For this research, the “Communication & Mass Media Complete” database is one of the useful databases, because the concept is the most suitable for this theme. I found a journal “Bridging digital divide: Efforts in India” from this database. So far, it is the best one which seems to answer to my question.

A difficulty of finding reference in my case is, because the digital divide is already a common problem in many countries in the world, there are a lot of resources in the database. I have to eliminate the resource carefully and should choose the latest ones as possible, because in the ever-changing IT situations, the values of the sources would fade as time goes by.

Differneces in learning behaviors

The biggest difference about the behavior between my classmates in this EBP and in the Japan is the active approach in the classroom. When I was in Japan, unless the teacher asked to and specify whom to answer his/her question, no one said anything in the class. Japanese students tend to be much afraid of making mistake in front of the classmates.
But in here in the EBP, everyone says their own opinions all the time. So there is always an active and cherrful atmosphere in the classroom. That is amazed me, and I will try more to say my openions even if it is not correct.

Personality and Language Learning

Do some personalities learn a language better than others? I think that achievement of learning language might not depend on personalities and not because that someone is better than others. Yet there are different methods for each single person that helps one's progresses, and the differences are come from our personalities.

Thinking about myself, one the strongest thing that helps me keep motivation to learn English is my curiosity. When I started learning English, I was addicted to rock music mostly from the US and the UK. I tried to memorize and understand their lyrics. I could learn some new words and idioms not in my English textbooks. (Sometimes, you should not use such words in the real world, though.) That was my motivation. It does not come from academic purpose but I am always curious about something and even now that helps me gain wide range of knowledge.

One more thing that helps me is my tenacity. Once I am interested in something, mostly I keep the interest for it for a long time. Learning language is fortunately one of such things of mine, so I could keep learning it.

Since I came here, however sometimes l cannot have enough communication with peole around me because I am still a bit afraid of contact with others. I am too shy to the people whom I do not know well. Though once I know them, I can talk to them well. One of the reasons that I wanted to go out from my country was to know a lot of people and learn a lot from them. Now it is the time to throw my fears away.

My IRP topic

In this EBP course, we have an Independent Research Project as well as the reguler classes. It might be our huge task in this 10 week.

The topic that I select in this research is the Global Digital Divide and focus on this topic in India.

When I worked as a system engineer in Tokyo, We sometimes had guest engineers from India to our office. (Some of them actually lived in the US, though.) They are excellent skilled people. ( Not only that they are but also really diligent. I was amazed that one day I heard that they came to the office at 6am. When I asked one of them about the reason later, his answer was "Just got up early from jet lag and just had nothing to do." ) Today in the IT industry, India-power is already measurable and they are huge human resources in some IT-developed country like Japan and the US.

However, in fact, several well known problems are still in India like luck of educational opportunities, immature infrastructural development and less accessibility to digital information for a lot of people. The definition of "global digital divide" in the background reading I did ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_digital_divide ) ,is distinguishable from the "digital divide" between social classes(people), is a geographical division. However, I think the case of this in India is complicated. I still do not understand clearly and how to make out this point. But I am already deeply interested in this topic and want to know what the problems are in this powerful country. There may be cultural, political or historical issues underling this phenomenon.


Attn teachers,

Because it is blog, a global tool anybody can access ( I am not sure who want to, though ) and also just for my writing practice, I write some description ( like introduction of this post ) knowingly. Of course, I know everyone in the class knows what I am doing.

Why Orange???

Yes, orange is my favorite colour. (Green is also, though.)


Since I have been here in Vancouver, I saw admirably beautiful sunset many times. It is like orange changes to ruby, then melts into navy blue. I feel it so mysterious. In Tokyo, the process of it is nearly same, but feels like orange is more like yellow, and the moment changing into the dark is really short. This is my impression. It is very difficult to express about the things like this by words.

Actually, my blogname is coming from my nickname in my childfood. It means "orange"(as fruits) in Japanese. To be exact, it is more like "tangerine", though "TangerineLife" isn't sound good, is it?



I wrote only about my listening at my first posting, I should mention about the rest of the questions.

There is a typical problem for us as non-native speakers. Of course, I faced this problem many times. When we talk to someone face to face, we can communicate even there are some grammatical, structural problem in the sentences. However, when we talk to someone on the phone, we would face a huge problem just to tell a small thing. What to know from this, when we speak we not only use our voice but many alternative functions e.g. eye contact, actions (body language) ,facial expressions etc...and highly depend on them. When only our voice is accepted to use, we have to speak clearly, fluently and compactly. We should not to put unnatural pauses in a centence many times. We tend to try to create a long complex sentences but we should know that we often fell it and make no sense as a result.

I already have been learning English for long time (I do not mention how long exactly, because you might now my age from it). I have kept tring to improve my English to "natural" level. Actually I feel I am coming little by little. Besides, still I feel there is a huge wall in front of me to get beyond.

After all, the way to improve speaking as well as listening, is just keep doing. More speak, more listen, that make you improved.

It is my first experience of living abroad for a long time. I got a chance to "do" English at all hours. What I have to do first is listen all the time from people around me, in the dorm, in the bus, in the shops and in the town. More important thing is, not to hesitate to talk to people. It is still bit difficult for me, but I try.

At the end of this 10 week course, I hope I will gain all the skills with confident.