High School Research Project / 高校研究論文プロジェクト

　At Friends School, our high school students do a research project that spans 10th and 11th grade. They decide what they want to research, spend the summer months conducting research on that topic and finally write up a report on it. Our librarian helps a lot and introduces the students to different research methods, especially those online. Each student has an adviser and that is a role even we in the Language Centre take up. We meet with the students three to four times in the year and have them update us on their progress. I have been impressed with the students willingness and efforts to use English when working with us despite their report and research being primarily in Japanese. At times I’m relieved since, depending on the topic, my Japanese may not be good enough to truly understand what they are researching.

　Last year in November, some of the best projects were selected for presentation. The students presented their research in front of the whole school one Thursday afternoon. I was very impressed with the topics. One student researched whether it’s safe to use free wi-fi or not. In order to conduct her research this student first taught herself HTML and CSS, two programming languages. Her conclusion was that free wi-fi is indeed a risk and we should be careful.

　The project for this year concluded today in the students gathering in Rhoads’ Hall and making short English presentations of their research to a group of classmates. Then 8 students, selected by us here in the Language Centre, presented their research in English to their year group. They did a great job of putting their research into easy to understand English for their classmates or varying levels. I am looking forward to the next group of research projects.