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The aim of this study is to examine and analyze Keats’s Scotland sonnets written during his Scotland walking tour which represents the turning point in his poetic career. For Keats, the tour had very complex motivation, background, and results. Especially the sonnets regarding Burns memorials in Scotland allegorize the crisis of his poetic identity. Keats’s crisis of self-consciousness was intensified by his confronting the residence of William Wordsworth and the actual circumstances of Robert Burns. Keats’s realization at Burns’s memorials of entangled web of human miseries and aesthetic perceptions did not resolve the problem. Rather, it put him more deeply into the problem of self-consciousness.

This study attempts to examine and provide a configuration of the complex relationship between EFL college students’ affective response and instructor written feedback. In doing so, the study specifically examines a) how certain affective responses inform students’ successful negotiation of written feedback in their writing, b) the correlation between students’ affective responses and types of written feedback received and c) variations of affective responses towards written feedback across students. Primary data included think-aloud sessions and semi-structured interviews. Students’ texts were also collected but used as reference points to clarify the primary data. Grounded theory was used to examine how students negotiate the received written feedback through semi-structured interviews and think-aloud sessions. Relying on Ferris & Hedgcock (1998), a code scheme was used to organize and classify the instructor feedback. Findings showed that EFL students felt satisfied, irritated, dismayed, dissatisfied, delighted, shocked, and showed refusal of feedback and agreement with feedback as part of their affective responses. While a single factor does not contribute to these responses, miscommunication and misunderstanding between the instructor and students, discouraging criticism, and negative comments from instructors were seen as notable factors. The research also showed that students’ affective responses may influence students’ tolerance and appropriation of instructor feedback.

This paper investigates the patterns of use of the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ by Singapore English speakers. Previous studies have successfully shown that the sound is realized in various forms in the language, but they remain silent on what percentage of speakers use a particular form of the sound. This is due to the fact that the studies are based on the impressionistic judgments of the researchers, or on the basis of a small number of speakers. In this article, we have interviewed 122 male university students and examined their pronunciations of the sound in word initial, medial and final positions. Our findings are, roughly, as follows: (i) 70 speakers (53%) use nonstandard forms [t,t,f], (ii) 23 speakers (19%) use the standard pronunciation in all three positions, (iii) 29 speakers (24%) use both standard and nonstandard pronunciations. These findings, together with other findings introduced in the text, will serve as a yardstick against which the future evolution of Singapore English can be measured.

This paper explores the effects of a three-week immersion English camp on Korean students at a university in Korea. The first part of the main body describes which programs comprised the immersion camp and how they were run. The students were taught from the following four courses: Communicating in English, Business English, Games and Drama. The second part shows the feedback of the participants through a survey analysis and the changes in the students’ English proficiency levels on the OPIc Speaking test. The purpose of the camp was to improve the students’ communication skills and instill a motivation to continue to study English. Through an analysis of the survey, this paper seeks to assess the degree of realization of the camp’s goals. The survey analysis shows that most participants think the intensive camp was very effective in improving their English. In addition, the changes in students’ Opic scores allow us to conclude that most participants’ English speaking proficiency levels improved quite dramatically. Lastly, the paper deals with additional suggestions for improving the camp in the future.

Vowel hiatus arises when two vowels are locally adjacent but heterosyllabified within words or across word boundaries. In English, as well-described, vowel clash is resolved by two strategies; glide insertion and glottal stop insertion. In fact, these sounds are not underlyingly present but added for ease of articulation in casual or fast speech. Following sonority-driven prominence scale in V1-V2 sequences, the least marked glides are the most favored to fix vowel hiatus. Which glide is adopted is closely related to the feature of the first vowel; for a palatal /j/-glide, V1 is a high front vowel, for a labio-velar /w/-glide, a high back vowel and for a central liquid /r/-glide, also called the intrusive r, a non-high vowel, i.e. homorganic. Furthermore, provided that V2 gets stressed, a laryngeal plosive also fills an empty onset even though it is the most marked at the point of vowel hiatus. These hiatus resolution strategies are well-couched into Optimality Theory(OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince, 1995) where Dep[F] type constraints ranked over the sonority-driven markedness constraints determine the glide j/w-epenthesis the best and the intrusive r the second-best if the former is banned. Glottal stop addition is also employed as a rescue strategy to remove vowel clash when glides are all blocked, i.e. before V2 bearing stress.

This study examines self-efficacy, defined as a person’s beliefs or personal judgments about his or her competencies, in relation to the English proficiency of university students in Korea. It also discusses the interaction of culture and self-efficacy in this context. Cross-cultural studies on the topic indicate that, in Asian countries with Confucian societal backgrounds, students’ high academic achievement is often accompanied by relatively high levels of anxiety and self-doubt, and relatively low levels of confidence and self-efficacy, in comparison to students in Western countries. This study’s data consist of the completed surveys of 29 students who had TOEFL scores of 110 or above (the highest possible TOEFL score is 120). Three types of data were considered in this study: the means of their TOEFL scores, the means of their self-efficacy ratings and the percentage of errors in their writing. The study finds that the participants’ ratings of their own English proficiency are, overall, lower than other indicators of their proficiency would suggest. It speculates about possible cultural reasons for this discrepancy between the participants’ self-efficacy and their actual proficiency, and discusses potential implications for educators.

This paper focuses on base truncation in English word formation. Deletion of base final vowel or rime occurs over a morpheme boundary formed by a morpheme concatenation. It is argued in this study that such truncation is attributed to avoid a sequence of vowels over a morpheme boundary, two contiguous syllables with identical onsets, the neutralization of a strong vowel in the ate suffix, and three or more consecutive stressless syllables in the output of word formation. Truncation of base final vowel is based on cross-linguistic tendency, which is reflected in the interaction between specific and general segmental faithfulness constraints. The deletion of base-final rime in three different sub-groups of data is implemented through Contiguity-Base, Id-Str(V), *Clash, and prosodically-related constraints such as Ft-Bin and *Lapse. The constraints and their rankings proposed in this study show effects of vowel-initial suffixes in word formation process in English. Even though structural requirements from diverse vowel-initial suffixes are incongruous, they all demand structural well-formedness in outputs and they are explained by the current analysis.

English prepositions have been known to include seemingly heterogeneous and unrelated meanings. Therefore, traditionally, the diverse meanings of a preposition are treated as something to be memorized. However, cognitive semantics considers the meanings of prepositions to be interrelated to each other, and can in fact provide the linguistic motivations in these interconnected relationships. In this paper, based on the cognitive semantics, the seemingly unrelated meanings of off are explained in a more holistic and systematic way. Among different tools of cognitive linguistics, perspectivization is adopted in the analysis of off. The meanings of off are categorized based on which part of the image schema is highlighted. In the image schema of off, a trajector moves from its source to a goal over a path. Depending on which part, among source, goal, and path is highlighted, the basic spatial meaning of off is extended diversely, creating various literal and metaphorical meanings. The result shows that the meanings of off always emphasize the source part of its image schema, unlike the meanings of away whose main emphasis is on the goal part.

In this study, I have attempted to show that there is a strong relationship between theory and history. First of all, it is represented that phonological theories, which have been developed in synchronic linguistics, can contribute to the understanding of a historical sound change. To put it in another way, we can also argue that historical data can deliver us a crucial hint for deciding on which theory is more useful or not when understanding our language. The second goal of this research is to find out what ‘Theoretical historical phonology’ is. To answer this question, I have shown different types of theoretical approaches and historical data from Old and Middle English. Furthermore, I have tried to combine theory with historical data to see how phonological frameworks effectively deal with diachronic data. Ultimately, I have tried to figure out the role of diachronic phonology in the field of linguistics.