What Is This?
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 several sources’ versions 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 business, 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!
How Can I Use It?
The “Home” page has previews of all the most recent boards. To view an actual board, just click or tap on the title (yellow area) of a board or where it says, “Read More.” Note: If you’re using a tablet, you may need to scroll across rather than down to see all the boards on a page.
Boards are organized into four colors as explained below, just as a general guide; Blue boards may have boring or difficult articles, and orange boards may have quite interesting or light topics, etc. (In fact, that’s why there are so few blue and orange boards – since boards are organized by topic and not usefulness, it’s rare for a board to have all useful/interesting articles, etc.). If you’ve got a lot of time, check out all four colors; A little less time, skip the orange (bottom) and just read the top three; Still less time, skip the bottom two and just try the blue and green. If time’s extremely limited, go with only the blue. Selecting from the dropdown menu above (“How Much Time Have You Got?”) automatically gives you these combinations anytime.
Blue — Especially interesting, useful, worth reading, light, or easy to read
Green — Quite interesting, useful, worth reading, light, or easy to read
Brown — Fairly interesting, useful, or worth reading; might not be so light or easy to read
Orange — Somewhat interesting or useful; Might be worth reading but might be hard to read or a heavy subject; May be interesting but not have much value for lessons
How Can I Search the Site?
You can click or tap on a tag (either within a board or in the right sidebar) or category (sidebar only), or use the search box. If you want to search for multiple items, separate the words in the search box with a plus sign. For example, type “cities+solutions” (no quotes). If no boards include all the terms you entered, partial matches will be listed. Selecting “Tab Groups” from the menu above will show various groupings of all tags.
When following links, remember that some sites, like the New York Times, limit the number of visits you can make per month from Japan.
Enjoy!