Tokyo Institute of Technology: Eleven international students complete Intensive Japanese Course with presentations to youngsters

Eleven international students at Tokyo Tech recently completed their Intensive Japanese Course, giving final presentations to an online elementary school audience and receiving their certificates of completion at a closing ceremony on February 3. After starting with the study of hiragana, katakana, and other Japanese language basics in October 2021, the diverse group of students impressed the audience with their use of Japanese and the content of their presentations, demonstrating that the 3.5 hours of study each weekday for four months had paid off handsomely.

Tokyo Tech’s Institute for Liberal Arts (ILA) offers short-term intensive courses twice a year to international students who want to improve their Japanese language skills rapidly. When joining the class, most students only know a handful of phrases in the language. For this second course of academic year 2021, the final presentations and closing ceremony were held on Ookayama Campus with appropriate COVID-19 countermeasures in place, while students of Senzokuike Elementary School joined the presentations via Zoom.

This semester, the final presentations included talks on the beaches of Japan and Trinidad and Tobago, Japanese architecture in northern Macedonia, traditional clothing of women in Iran, and historical sites in Jordan. The elementary school students in the audience, who had also prepared for the event using study material distributed by the international students beforehand, listened intently to these unique stories from around the world. A short Q&A session followed each presentation, allowing the international students and elementary school students to deepen their exchanges through various topics. At the end of the session, the audience voted for the three best presentations, which were as follows.