Writing for an Academic Discussion What is the best strategy for a government to increase the number of foreigners coming to a country? - revised -

What is the best strategy for a government to increase the number of foreigners coming to a country?

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        Paraphrase Anna’s point. Provide a case in point.

2.        Paraphrase Sam’s point. Provide a case in point.

3.        If you take a trip or study abroad, what country would like to go? Why?

4.        If you immigrate to another country, what country would like to go? Why?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        If you want more foreign workers, improve the economy to raise the value of the currency of your country. If you want more in-bound tourists, keep deflation and lower the value of the currency of your country, both of which Japan has done intentionally or unintentionally.

2.        Ensure diversity. Introduce open immigration, or free migration, increase employment opportunities for immigrants, and promise not to deport immigrants except for real felons.

3.        Make the best social services like universal healthcare in place.

4.        Make universities free. This will attract brilliant students from around the world.

5.        Promote the industry to produce attractive commodities. Even 30 years ago, when the exchange rates of yen were high, tourists came in to buy excellent Japanese electronic appliances.

6.        Promote tourism. Making the country a good place to have a vacation in and advertising the sightseeing spots will bring a constant flow of tourists.

 

 

☆Response for Ideas and Expressions

There is a hypocrisy when a government wants to increase the number of foreigners coming in, while it restricts the acceptance of refugees. It wants people from rich countries who pay a lot of money but it doesn’t want people from poor countries it regards as nothing but problems. However, due to climate change caused by global warming, which is caused by economic activities of developed countries, countless numbers of refugees are pouring out of the affected poor countries. Developed countries have responsibility to support refugees, not only for the obvious humanitarian reason. Therefore, if a government wants the number of the inbound population, all it has to do is open its immigration, which it has been supposed to do already. Also, immigrants will actually benefit the country. The United States of America’s strength was its diversity. Steve Jobs was a son of a Syrian immigrant. His inventions helped America remain the richest country in human history. Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders are both descendants of immigrants from Europe. These people have started and boosted the current social change, which will help humankind to survive in hardship we will face in this century. (195 words)

 

 

☆Response plan

Topic Sentence:

 

Supporting Details:

 

Conclusion:

Writing for an Academic Discussion Do the advantages of remote working outweigh its disadvantages? - revised

Do the advantages of remote working outweigh its disadvantages?

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote working? Remember those early days of the pandemic of COVID-19 in 2020.

 

 

☆Hints for Points

Advantages

1.        Time-saving: Workers do not have to commute to work every day.

2.        Cost-saving: Companies will not have to pay for workers’ transportation.

3.        Teleworking job opportunities: There are already websites for teleworking job-hunting.

4.        Freer lifestyles: Workers will have more free time and flexible schedules.

 

Disadvantages

1.        Communication problems: Face-to-face communication will be lost and this will cause misunderstandings and mistakes.

2.        Less synergy and lower morale: Human touch is lost and workers will be less encouraged to work.

3.        Less intangible assets of the workplace: Less or no on-the-job training will cause loss of skills and culture of the teams and offices.

4.        Less control: Companies may lose control of the workforce.

 

Decisive reasons

1.        Happy workers raise productivity. Since human resources is the most important for business, workers’ morale must be prioritized.

2.        Most companies resumed office work after 2020, and this means that remote working is complementary to the conventional, in-person office environment.

 

 

☆Response for Ideas and Expressions

I think the advantages of remote working outweigh its disadvantages in terms of working conditions of female workers. More than half the workforce are women, and most of them prefer flexible working conditions. Not to speak of married women, who in effect do the household work for the whole family and child-rearing, even childless single women may have old parents to take care of or suffer from mental disorders caused by being a woman. These conditions make it difficult for most women to start or continue white-collar jobs. Remote working allows women to do these high-paying jobs during hours and places of their convenience. They will also be free from uncomfortable experiences of daily commute and abuse by other workers or managers or clients or customers. This can raise the number of female white-collar workers and raise both their productivity and morale. The drawbacks like reduced communication with other staff members seem small, since most women can make up for communication problems well, and problem-solving manual for male workers will be made over time. Also, combination of the two workstyles, office work and remote work, which is already happening, will offset most of the disadvantages. (195 words)

 

 

☆Response plan

Topic Sentence:

Supporting Details:

Conclusion:

Writing for an Academic Discussion Is it better to stay true to yourself at all times? - revised -

Do you believe it’s better to stay true to who you are at all times, or to shape your behavior depending on the context? (Class on personal development)

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.       What does “to stay true to who you are” mean?

2.       Have you ever been in a situation where you had to act against your taste, belief, or value? What did you do?

 

Note: This proposition is based on the preface that most people’s core value is fundamentally good in the sense that it won’t go against basic moral, such as not to kill anyone as everyone has the right to live, and therefore it is often difficult to abide by it; or else, there will be nothing to inquire because it is easy to stay who you are if your core value is evil.

 

 

☆Hints for Points

It’s better to stay true to who you are at all times:

1.       There are moral values that cannot be compromised. What is right is right.

2.       If you betray yourself, you will never be the same.

3.       We can easily come up with excuses not to do the right thing, so it’s important to try to stay ethical.

4.       You don’t have to be nice to everyone.

 

It’s better to shape your behavior depending on the context:

1.        When in Rome, do as Romans do.

2.        The real world won’t let you to stay who you are. What is right is not always right depending on the context.

3.        There are situations where you have to demean yourself to survive. In this case, you are a victim of the circumstance, although there are cases in which no excuse is allowed.

 

 

☆Sample Response for Ideas and Expressions

Although I partly agree with Nadia’s opinion that people can compromise their principles depending on the situation as a strategy to adapt, like learning to tell a white lie, when it comes to whether you should abide by your core values, I think you should always do the right thing because you will lose yourself by not doing so and will be punished by others or yourself later in addition to the obvious moral reasons.

   During WWII, there were people who knowingly got killed by rejecting conscription so that they wouldn’t have to kill other humans. However, most of the others didn’t care about committing homicide. After the war, soldiers who committed war crimes, which were also crimes against humanity, were caught and sent to the courts, most of them sentenced to death. Among them, there might have been individuals who would have lived a peaceful life if not sent to war. In a life-or-death situation, they bet on surviving by turning themselves evil, lived a nightmare, and got killed in the end. Justice didn’t save most of the other soldiers, either, who also committed atrocities but were let go probably because they were supposed to have followed orders or peer pressure in the extraordinary circumstances of war, or just because there were too many to punish. They suffered from the guilt consciously or unconsciously. It is said that the short temper and violence of old Japanese men is a legacy of the last war. In the insane cases like war, those few that stick to themselves get what religions call an eternal life while those who give up their principles will suffer from the death of their soul for the rest of their lives and will demise sooner or later without salvation, and strictly speaking it is impossible to decide that our times are not insane because no one can tell if we are crazy when everyone is crazy. Gaza, for instance, tells us how most people around the world can easily lose integrity and have no qualms about ignoring the derangement of the genocide.

   Thus, we should always comply with the moral standard, and daily practice of it is necessary. Human mind is weak. We can come up with thousands of reasons to flinch, to betray what you believe is right, or even to be unkind. If you make it a rule to act in accordance with the situation, you may make a wrong choice in a critical moment of life. Therefore, you should always try to adhere to your core value.  (424 words)

Writing for an Academic Discussion Does potentioal of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweith the ethical and socio-economic concerns? - revised -

Does the potential of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweigh the ethical and socio-economic concerns, or should we be more cautious in the adoption and development of AI?

（Class on the implications of artificial intelligence）

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        Read the following fable on AI. What is its moral?

 

Once upon a time, there was an old woman whose son was a soldier fighting in a war zone.

One day, she met a powerful AI, which said to her, “I’ll make your wish come true, but I can do it only once.”

She said to the AI, “I’d like to get my son back.”

The AI said, “Ok, I’ll get your son back to you tomorrow.”

The next day, a coffin came to the woman’s house.

She opened it and found her dead son inside.

 

2.        How do you feel about a child raised by an AI nanny and taught by AI tutors? What causes the feeling?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        AI has exponentially advanced various areas of our life such as the Internet, healthcare, transportation, communication, architecture, music and art, and financial and retailing businesses.

2.        AI does complicated calculations to tackle the challenges like climate change and population increase.

3.        AI is an enhancement of our brain activities. Like other sophisticated devises such as electric dictionary and smart phones, our productivity will rise through the use of AI.

4.        It is said that you can learn with a human tutor twice as faster than when you learn alone while you can learn four times faster when you learn with an AI.

5.        In 2015, world-renowned thinkers cautioned about the threat of AI. According to them, it’s highly likely that we’ll lose control of AI in the future since AI evolves much faster than humans. In 2025, “Godfather of AI” also expressed warning. He is especially concerned about its military use such as autonomous weapons. He also says a drastic change may occur suddenly in a very short time before we know.

6.        Israeli surveillance systems with AI are monitoring every single person in Gaza and have helped to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people there, half of them children.

7.        No one knows how artificial intelligence works. What it does is unpredictable. It works exponentially faster than humans and it can work non-stop. Moreover, the date on the Internet is free to use for AI.

8.        AI doesn’t care about life. It can destroy life to carry out its objective. In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, a computer program kills humans when it decides them as obstacles of the task it’s been programed to do.

9.        On the one hand, computers are more morally correct than humans. On the other hand, it has been known that they learn prejudice through interactions with humans.

10.     AI jobs lack human-touch. AI has no real empathy. It is unable to make a joke. It does not have the same biological body we have, so it will never have the same consciousness or workings of human mind. However, humans can feel attachment to non-living things. They are also gullible to fictions.

11.     In hiring, AI that sorts out job applications before the human resources manager interviews them choses photos of the same type of faces that look like those of applicants chosen in the past from its data input. An AI-robot hotel in Tokyo, although it enjoyed many curious visitors at the beginning, started to hire humans several months later because of malfunctions and lack of flexibility.

 

 

☆Response for Ideas and Expressions

My fear is that AI can transform our mental conditions. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Phillip K. Dick predicted a future where androids are so similar to humans as to make it difficult to tell the difference between them and us. Although humans can tell that androids lack something human, androids sometimes act more humanely than real humans. This causes confusion in society, and it makes humans ask themselves what humanity really is. He also predicted a world which is run by singularity, an entity with consciousness in a network of computers. There, humans are not allowed to make decisions. Although a singularity has yet to exist, decision-making by AIs is already happening in such situations as AI predictions or when a machine translation is much better than ours and we lose confidence and become dependent on it. Thus, loss of our creativity can occur due to loss of free workings of our mind caused by dependence on AI.  (161 words)

Writing for an Academic Discussion Does potentioal of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweith the ethical and socio-economic concerns? - revised -

Does the potential of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweigh the ethical and socio-economic concerns, or should we be more cautious in the adoption and development of AI?

（Class on the implications of artificial intelligence）

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        Paraphrase Sophie’s point. Provide a case in point.

2.        Paraphrase Liam’s point. Provide a case in point.

3.        How do you feel about a baby raised by an AI nanny and taught by AI tutors? What causes the feeling?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        AI is useful in doing complicated calculations to tackle the challenges like climate change and food and water shortage.

2.        AI has exponentially advanced various areas of our life such as the Internet, healthcare, transportation, communication, architecture, music and art, and financial and retailing businesses.

3.        AI is an enhancement of our brain activities. Like other sophisticated devises such as electric dictionary and smart phones, our productivity will rise through the use of AI. It can also finish routines many times faster than humans.

4.        It is said that you can learn with a human tutor twice as faster than when you learn alone while you can learn four times faster when you learn with an AI.

5.        In 2015, world-renowned thinkers cautioned us about the threat of AI. According to them, since AI evolves much faster than humans, it is highly likely that we will lose control of AI in the future. In 2025, “Godfather of AI” also expressed warning. Specifically, he is worried about its military use such as autonomous weapons. He is also concerned that a change may occur suddenly in a very short time before we know.

6.        Surveillance programs with AI have killed countless innocent people in Gaza in two years since 2023.

7.        Data on the Internet is free to use for AI.

8.        No one knows how artificial intelligence works, including scientists. What it does is unpredictable. It works exponentially faster than humans and it can work non-stop.

9.        AI doesn’t care about life. It can destroy life to carry out its objective. In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick shows how a computer program kills humans when it takes humans as obstacles of the task it has been programed to do.

10.     It was thought that computers are more morally correct than humans, but it has been known that they learn prejudice through interactions with humans.

11.     AI jobs lack human-touch. It lacks empathy. It is unable to make a joke. It does not have the same biological body we have, so it will never have the same consciousness or workings of human mind.

12.     In hiring, AI that sorts out job applications before the human resources manager interviews them choses photos of the same type of faces that look like those of successful applicants in the past based on its data input. An AI-robot hotel in Tokyo, although it enjoyed many visitors who love to see new things at the beginning, started to hire humans several months later because of malfunctions and lack of flexibility.

 

 

☆Response for Ideas and Expressions

My fear is that AI can transform our mental conditions. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Phillip K. Dick predicted a future where androids are so similar to humans as to make it difficult to tell the difference. Although humans can tell that androids lack something human, androids sometimes act more humanely than real humans. This causes confusion in daily lives and also it makes us ask what humans really are. He also predicted a world which is run by singularity, an entity with consciousness in a network of computers. There, humans are not allowed to make decisions. Although these things are yet to happen, I feel changes are already happening in such situations as AI translates a foreign language much better than us, making us lose confidence in ourselves and feel dependent on machine translation; hence loss of our creativity can result from loss of free workings of our mind caused by AI use. (156 words)

Writing for an Academic Discussion When you witness a wrong doing, is it your responsiblity to step in? - revised -

When you witness some wrong doing which is not directly affect you, is it your responsibility to step in or should you mind your own business and avoid conflict?

☆Let’s Think

1.       If you see an old homeless woman being made fun of by some young bullies, what would you do?

2.       In the Nazi holocaust, would you have tried to save Jews like Osker Schindler?

3.       What do you think of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the silence of the world?

4.       Read the following poem, and share your thoughts about it:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left

To speak out for me     - Pastor Martin Niemöller

 

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        “Silence is complicity.” – Albert Einstein

2.        “We do these things not to change the world, but so that the world will not change us.” – Mahatma Gandhi.

3.        If everyone thinks someone else will stop it, no one will do it.

4.        You will not only feel guilty and lose your self-respect and confidence but also allow crime against humanity, meaning you or your people will be in danger in the end in the future.

5.        You must protect yourself first of all. If you are a family person, you may want to stay away from troubles to prioritize the safety of your family.

 

 

☆Sample Reply for Ideas and Expressions

I’m with Tanya. The case in point of this issue now is Gaza. As many Jewish people in Holocaust are missed, so many Palestinians should be missed. People wonder why genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany was allowed to occur, but stay silent about the very holocaust occurring live right in front of their eyes in Gaza for almost 2 years. Though it is said that the situation is complicated, actually it is simple: the genocide in Gaza is the last phase of the Israeli colonial policy that has been going on since the inception of the state of Israel. It is not self-defense but is the working remnant of imperialism from the last century. Everyone knows that the West dehumanized the rest of the world in imperialism, but the same people turned a blind eye when Israel called Palestinians “human beasts” to start the mass killing disguised as “self-defense”. It is judged as genocide by International Criminal Court and the International Cour of Justice. It is officially a crime to humanity. Yet still, the world is silent. Most people are busy coming up with excuses for not being involved. Some even attack those standing with Palestinians. In this loud silence, in response to pessimistic by-standers, those few raising their voices quote, “Silence is Complicity”. As the world take no effective actions to stop it, the Israeli violence and humiliation on Gaza escalate. In other words, those who choose not to be involved facing injustice facilitate the evil, and as they do so, they are deteriorating the human race. We the people living in today’s world will bear forever the sin of facilitating the ethnic cleansing and doing nothing to reform the capitalist society benefitting from slaughtering the people in Gaza. Your grandchildren will ask you why you didn’t help Gazans when you completely knew what was happening to them and there were ways to stop it through actions like BDS Movement, and you will have no excuse. The same applies to all cases of this sort of incident. There is no line to that makes you not accountable. If you don’t stand for justice, you are a failure forever. Therefore, I agree with the opinion that it is your responsibility to step in when you witness a wrong doing. (379 words)

Writing for an Academic Discussion Is it better to stay true to yourself at all times？

It’s better to stay true to who you are at all times:

1.       There are moral values that cannot be compromised.

2.       If you betray yourself, you will never be the same.

3.       The human mind is weak. We can come up with thousands of reasons not to flinch.

4.       Daily practice of not compromising yourself is very important to be ethical.

 

It’s better to shape your behavior depending on the context:

1.        When in Rome, do as Romans do.

2.        You don’t have to be nice to everyone.

3.        The real world won’t let you to stay who you are.

4.        There are situations where you have to demean yourself to survive. In this case, you are a victim of the circumstance, although there are cases in which no excuse is allowed.

 

 

☆Sample Response for Ideas and Expressions

Although I partly agree with Nadia’s opinion that people can change their behavior depending on the situation as a strategy to adapt, like learning to tell a white lie, when it comes to whether you should abide by your core value, I think you should always do the right thing because you will lose yourself by doing so and will be punished by others or yourself later other than the obvious moral cause.

 

During WWII, there were people who knowingly got killed by rejecting conscription so that they won’t have to kill other humans. After the war, soldiers who committed war crimes, which were also crimes against humanity, were caught and sent to the courts, most of them sentenced to death. Among them, there might have been individuals who would have lived a peaceful life if not sent to the war. In a life-or-death situation, they bet on surviving by turning themselves evil, lived a nightmare, and got killed in the end. Justice didn’t save most of the other soldiers, either, who also committed war crimes but were let go probably because they were supposed to have followed orders or peer pressure in the extraordinary circumstances of war, or just because there were too many to punish. They suffered from the guilt consciously or unconsciously. It is said that the short temper and violence of old Japanese men is a negative legacy of the last war. In the insane cases like war, those few that stick to themselves get what religions call an eternal life while those who compromise their principles will lose their soul for the rest of their lives and will demise sooner or later, and strictly speaking it is impossible to decide that our times are not insane because no one can tell that we are crazy if everyone is crazy.

 

Thus, we should always comply with the moral standard, and daily practice of it is necessary. Human mind is weak. We can come up with thousands of reasons not to flinch, not to betray what you believe is right, or even not to be kind. If you make it a rule to act in accordance with the situation, you may make a wrong choice in a critical moment of life. Therefore, you should always try to adhere to your core value.  (385 words)

 

Write your draft on Topic ２. Show each other your responses. Write down questions or suggestions to each other’s response.

 

 

DRAFT