English for Activists

Dear All,

Hello. I hope you are well there.
I'm sorry to delay delivering E-news letter.

We had a class on Apr. 6th 2010, we did four activities.

1) Correction
We corrected Seika's E-newsletter which delivered last week.
It was almost perfect, but there are some uncommon phrases for native speakers,
we interchanged some words common expression.

2 )Discussion about the new meeting room
We have to find the new meeting room, which is used, from May 11th,
we discussed about it.
Some people propose some places.
For example, "Yotsuya Hiroba", "YWCA", "Cafe Renoir",

Hi, everyone. This is an e-news letter for the last class on 30th March. I will briefly describe the activities in the class and make small notes of what appeared remarkable to me.

We did three things in the class.

Firstly, we did the correction of the last e-news letter written by Yasu-san. There, Yasu-san detailed the process of Monopoly we played in the class. I thought it amazing that he could represent the process so meticulously, none of which I could recall (perhaps I did not know what was going on, even when I was playing!).

Takasu, Joe, Keiichi and Yasuko worked on this text from Shige's report:

Object

The object of this forum is to contribute to build north east asia green community through making sustainable living area. The first forum ware started at 2001 and continued every year changing the holding place.

Subject
Turn around the past years, the subject were changed every year. Takesima in Korea named Dokuto domain problem, Japanese Textbook of History, Nuclear armament of North Korea, Worship Yasukuni Shrine problem, Decentralization.

This the the text before corrections by Daisuke, Rie and Shige:

Hakenmura (Toshikoshi hakenmura, "Tent City") was a camp at Hibiya Park, from Dec. 31 2008 to Jan. 5 2009. About 500 people, various ages, from various cities, came to stay there for wormth and foods and beds. Because they lost their job, home, and entire fortune. But they couldn't depend on anyone. Almost of them were temporary workers. They were trembling from cold and hunger.

After corrections:

In class we worked on texts written by participants. One group worked on Sumiko Takaki's report back from the CEDAW meeting in New York.

This is the text before corrections by Keiko, Sumiko and Rutsuko:

1. On the '70th, Women Liberation movement was very aggressive all over the world. In those background, United Nation adopted 'Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women' on 1979.
Japanese Government ratified the treaty on 1985 by pushing Women movement.

I asked groups to brainstorm things that tell us there is an economic crisis, using the SEE, HEAR, and FEEL activity from Educating for a Change. Here is what the groups wrote. What stands out to you? What is most interesting or important?

We know there is an economic crisis when we HEAR:

On the news:
• that Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt,
• that many temp workers were/are getting fired
• that stock prices went/goes down dramatically
• that suicide rate increased for the last six months

About Chris Newman

[This is a corrected version of Maeda-san's presentation about her upcoming trip to Nova Scotia. Good luck on your trip! Please blog about what you see and learn! -- Matt]

Introduction

Hello, everyone.
Thank you giving me time to make this presentation.
Before my presentation, let me introduce myself again.

My name is Kaoru Maeda.
I have been an elected member of the Koto Ward assembly since last year.

I am going to visit Nova-Scotia in Canada from July 29th to August 5th. It is a study tour to learn about their waste/resource management policy.

Here are five sentences from the Tokyo EFA class. They are great sentences, but each needs to be corrected. Can you find the problems and fix them?

1. What kind of activists do they?

2. Are they a union member?
3. As the activist, what is your agenda now?
4. They are maybe married couple.
5. If we search their name on internet, we can do.

Please try correcting these sentences. If you are registered on this website, you can comment on this blog entry.