About

Letter from Editor-in-Chief

Real Reporter Online, a website to publish stories written by students who learn English as a foreign language, intends to seek two goals. One is to facilitate cross-cultural understanding among the young people in Northeast Asia. Northeast Asia including Japan, China, South Korea, North Korea and Russia, is the region in the world where the Cold War still haunts its future. Today’s young people might be still influenced by fears and ignorance of the previous generations, but they are eager to learn about each other. It is common to travel among this region, learning their languages, and sharing tweets about their pop idols. The willingness to share their cultural knowledge is growing, and it is our aim to foster mutual understanding by sharing stories. The other is to support their effort to learn English. The countries in Northeast Asia has one common problem; namely, effective English learning. English proficiency is not improving in proportion to the effort expended due to the linguistic and cultural context of these countries. The English classroom, consisting of monolingual students, is somewhat fake and not real, because they pretend to be American or British when they practice communicating in English. Real Reporter Online aims to provide students with an authentic language environment where they must use English to communicate their ideas. Here, the students express their ideas in English to the world. They are “real reporters.”

Although our stories contain imperfect English words and sentences. I am confident that ours stories offer rich information about the cultures of Northeast Asian students. Their perspectives and experiences are real and expressed from their hearts.

Mariko Eguchi, Editor-in-chief
University of Shimane, Japan