This is a website for students of Reverie English Conversation School in Tajimi, Japan. If you’re not connected to the school but find it useful or interesting, great! Share and let us know.
Stringboards are little collections of links to articles or stories on the web. The articles in one board might all be about a single topic, or there might be many topics in one board, with a different small connection from one article to the next. There’s generally some “string” (often straightforward, sometimes silly) that connects the stories in a board, and each story is just a springboard for discussion in the class. From any starting point, conversations can go in any direction.
The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated stories is absolutely a feature, not a bug. Great conversations, and great ideas, come when the walls between topics come down. Some boards also have various sources’ coverage of exactly the same story. It’s often not necessary to read every version, though seeing different perspectives, as well as different ways of using English to express the same thing, can be useful. Some topics, like ceramics, are of local interest. Others may reflect students’ interests or fields of endeavor, or recurring themes in the classroom.
Why is there no original content? At the moment, there’s barely time to curate, organize, and publish links. If time permits, we may add comments, background information, questions, discussion guides, etc.. Also, as these are really just starting points, and the point of advanced conversation lessons is to communicate in English, a lot of the conversation “content” ultimately comes from students!