Earticle

“Barn Burning” is a coming of age story which focuses on the spiritual growth of Sarty Snopes, especially in his dysfunctional family. Sarty is a son of a sharecropper, Abner Snopes, who is violent, destructive and antisocial, whereas his mother is silenced and hardly visible. Accordingly, Sarty, a 10-year-old boy, who has a low level of differentiation of self, depends on his father entirely and his father wields a powerful influence on him. Abner teaches him to stick to his own blood and even forces him to lie in court for family. However, when he accepts de Spain, who symbolizes justice and truth, as the third person, he forms a triangle. This three-person relationship makes him forget despair and fear caused by his father, though his inner conflict between family and justice even deepens. Finally, on the night his father plans to burn de Spain’s barn out of vengeance, Sarty refuses to act out his father’s wishes and put his thoughts into words with courage. By breaking away from his attachment to his father, Sarty gains his freedom and his own identity.

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy focuses the era in which the foundations of racial slavery were just being laid, in the late 17th century. Females need the protection of men and experience difficulties in being independent in those days. Most of the main characters in A Mercy are orphans. They were abandoned by their parents for one reason or another. Because of this traumatic memory, they want to have attachments to compensate their experiences of loss in their childhood. Whatever those attachments are, they are fascinated by the current situation and overcompensation leads them to fail to fulfill their wishes and experience another loss. Even though many things have happened to their lives; losing a husband, children, and lovers, they were not sure what those meant at that time. However, the female characters eventually realize that the true mercy comes by remembering motherhood. Motherhood motivates them to have power and to stand up once again. Finally they can face to the threat of men and the world.

This paper examines the correlation between vegetarianism and social improvement in Shelley’s “A Vindication of Natural Diet”. By using comparative anatomy to compare the similarities and differences between animal and human body structures, Shelley emphasizes that the human body is suitable for vegetarianism. Therefore, he insists that people with a compassion for animals can lead a healthy life on a vegetarian diet. In particular, Shelley firmly believes that practicing a vegetarian diet can improve society. Firstly, as Shelley gives examples of tyrants, Nero and Muley Ismael, eating meat and drinking alcohol turn people into violent tendencies. Therefore, vegetarianism and temperance can reduce violence in society. Secondly, to tackle hunger in the poor, using land to grow vegetables rather than as a pasture to produce meat is a more effective use of the land. Thirdly, the transition into a vegetarian diet can lead to a change in social class differences by restoring the rights of farmers whose right to labor is exploited and by forming a solidarity across social classes by eating the same vegetable based diet. Overall, Shelly argues that vegetarianism can lead to the greatest benefits to society as a whole.

This novel is full of images of beauty icons for the whiteness, physical and psychological violences, desire to be a whole person as a black, and so on. With Pecola's pursuing her own dream, this paper aims to examine the meaning of her phantom self through the soul-destroying process based on her black surroundings. She is destined to lead a life of humiliation due to her blackness, so she is constantly victimized and humiliated in the family and the community. It means that the caste hierarchy of the black society can be atrocious because it stems from the White standard that makes the blacks invisible and urges them to such extremes. As the whiteness functions as the yardstick of personal worth in the work, it pushes Pecola into not only anxiety and disorder, but also distorted desire. For the reason, she is psychologically deserted by her parents and the community, and further her earnest desire for the blue eye makes her insane after all. However, while showing these severe processes in the racist society, the study consequently emphasizes Toni Morrison's messages of understanding and love that make readers look into our severe society.

The purpose of this study is to examine women’s multi-dimensional oppression in Ngugi wa Thinong’s first novel. The female characters seem to be marginalised by the critics in colonized Kenya. In this study, the female figures of the novel are focused on and analyzed in the idea of romantic love, which more than anything else has fettered women to patriarchal relations. The bourgeoisie employed the ideology of romantic love for the use of violence to exploit and take advantage of the women in the colonized country. This means women’s labour is considered a natural resource, freely available like air and water. Ngugi portrays female characters as victims of colonialism and patriarchy, mothers, oppressed figures, and also freedom fighters. In the novel, Nyokabi is depicted to be clever enough to educate her son, Njoroge, although she is abusively exploited and ignored by the men of patriarchal system and Kikuyu’s traditional rules in colonized society. This narrative is highly recommended because we can follow women’s history in it.

The literary world of William Faulkner is divided into two periods. The latter half of his literary career is distinctly separate from his previous one in terms of its themes and techniques. Renunciation is the most important theme in his later work. Bayard Sartoris renounces to take his revenge on his enemy who had killed his father in a duel. Instead, he decides to confront him unarmed at the risk of his own life. Bayard’s dauntless courage and firm conviction of nonviolence ends up achieving the respect of the community. Similarly, Ike McCaslin passes up inheriting McCaslin plantation which has been tainted with exploitation and incest. His renunciation has been disparaged as an irresponsible escape and negligence of duty. His resolution, however, could be a profound form of activism which follows the kenosis of Christ who was willing to divest himself of his own divinity and take the form of a servant for the human race. Christ even laid down his own life to redeem sinners. Ike likewise gives up his own right over the property and lives as a carpenter for the rest of his life. The renunciation of both protagonists sheds light on the reason why Faulkner adopted a more positive outlook on human destiny in his later life.

This study examines the colonial suppression and exploitation of a black woman’s body in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. Venus’s body is an object for the amused white spectators’ gaze, anatomical dissection, and medical research. Through the public exhibition and exploitation of her body, she is colonized and grows accustomed to the power. She did not have any right to own her body, which belonged to Mother-Showman and later Doctor Baron, who intended to examine her body after her death. Her race and distinctive feature with big buttock made people consider her a kind of animal or inferior species. And the report from Baron’s anatomy gives the audience the proof for it. She was not free in life or in death, being exhibited naked in Europe without her consent. She was ceaselessly otherized and colonized by the white male. Her body is represented as a symbol of sacrifice from nineteenth-century colonial power. Parks highlighted these colonial traces in the past and rewrote the hidden history for the black women.

This paper aims at analyzing Kazuo Ishiguro’s arguably second most popular novel, Never Let Me Go, focusing on the structures and influence of the stories in it. The novel has the narrative structure knitted with many made-up stories and ‘theories’ the clones fabricate and disseminate. So it looks crucial in understanding the narrative to figure out the reasons the clones produce the stories and the functions of them in their individual and communal aspects. The clones keep making stories in order to understand their circumstances separated from a broader context and to find out their identities. Though they seem to have no interest in revolting against humans, we can infer from their habit of story making that they would create myths and stories which would eventually give them a group identity.

Things Fall Apart has been recognized as one of the best African novels since its publication in the middle of the 20th century. It tells the story of the village of Umuofia from within, retrieving the lost voice of the colonized. Some critics have praised the book’s endeavor to search for lost roots and identity. I think the romantic idealization that all was well before white people came to the land is of little use for the post-independence era. It is not very helpful to try to purify Umuofia completely from Western influences, either. Okonko tried to be one of the greatest in his clan, only to fall. He was as much a tragic hero as Macbeth was, for they share similar goals and temperament. Okonko’s case, however, has its peculiarity. He did everything to preserve what was traditional in his culture, but then eventually killed himself, going against his cultural code. This paradoxical choice makes him an example of a post-colonial tragic hero.

Stephen Leacock’s humorous Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) is now less known outside Canada, but was in its time possibly more recognized abroad than the country was, and remains a foundational touchstone of Canadian fiction. Yet its genial humor has brought it affection but slighter academic regard, and its amorphous narrator has received criticism for his claimed inconsistency in knowledge level and identity. This article asserts that this alleged inconsistency can be explained by the example of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas. While it is an odd connection, Chaucer also deploys a narrator who knowingly employs a lowered or counterfactual viewpoint, and so both the poem and the Sketches are contextualized as explicit performances. Recognizing the narrator’s guise as an admitted reciter separate from his fictive story may help elucidate this critical issue and raise regard for Leacock’s masterpiece.

This paper is a study on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in terms of religious symbolism and universal education. Up until now, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been typically read as anachronistic social activism, sentimental Marxist fables, and being weakened Christian theology through failed preacher, Jim Casy. The religious interpretation of this work has also regarded the text at best as an allegorical reproduction of Exodus. However, since the Joads end the story not in the promised land but in the destitute place, such criticism requires complete rereading of this novel. Therefore, this novel is more meaningful if it is considered to be a reversal of Exodus. The Joads family move from a desperate but occupied promise land, Oklahoma to bondage of California. Through this extended image, Steinbeck shows a greater vision of material poverty teaching the Joads a broader Christian view of the world, a universal evolution from “I” to “we”.

This paper delves into some aspects of arguments along with adjuncts, widely illustrated in terms of tests and criteria in the literature. I argue that they are largely syntactic in nature and posited to exhibit the syntactic well-formedness of sentences. It follows that this straightforward clarification of arguments often excludes some thematic adverbial phrases as an adjunct on the one hand and includes non-thematic phrases as an argument on the other. Accordingly, I suggest that we need to posit two types of arguments in this paper: semantic and syntactic. Semantic arguments, which are closely associated with the meaning of the predicate, are base-generated by Merge within VP (or AP) under the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis (Fukui & Speas, 1986; Koopman & Sportiche, 1991) and receive a thematic role. On the contrary, syntactic arguments are those that are base-generated by Merge outside VP (or AP) or derived by movement to the so-called A-position for syntactic well-formedness, receiving a theta role. This dual analysis of arguments is argued to provide a more principled account of a variety of constructions such as expletive, passive, unaccusative, raising constructions, and so on.

The present study investigated the types of peer reviews and revisions by Korean EFL college students on their writing, and described students’ perception towards peer review. It comprised of a sample of twelve college students joined in this peer review and revision process through surveys and in-depth interviews. The results demonstrate that the participants’ peer review paid more attention to addition and positive praise, and their revisions focused on corrections, additions, and no revision. Based on the holistic and analytic scoring results, it indicates that the peer review activity did not reach the expected increase in writing quality. However, participants increased in C-test scores and vocabulary, and employed many writing strategies from their peers. After the peer review process, the participants recognized that the peer review interaction helped them improve their learning: how to share ideas, organize their writing, compare different thoughts of peers, read each other’s writings, and find out their own strengths and weaknesses. The results showed that the participants became more positive towards writing in English because they became less anxious in writing as they repeatedly engaged in the peer review process.

Teachers’ sense of efficacy, referring to teachers’ own beliefs in their ability to execute courses of action to perform a specific task, has been widely studied in the field of education. Given the increasing numbers of native English-speaking (NES) teachers at all academic levels in Korea, the current study aims to explore what contributed to and threatened their sense of self-efficacy to teach English-medium courses at Korean universities. The questionnaire, including demographic profiles, the Korean University Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy in Teaching English (KUTSETE) scale, and four open-ended questions, was distributed online to 50 NES teachers. The findings reveal that the NESs scored highest in efficacy for speaking English, followed by classroom management, instructional strategies, student engagement, and finally, at the lowest score, speaking Korean. Furthermore, Korean linguistic and cultural proficiency turned out to be the dominant factor shaping the participants’ self-efficacy in teaching Korean university students. In addition, teachers’ academic majors, teaching experience, command of native English, emotional support, and sense of humor strongly influenced their levels of efficacy. Since most teacher efficacy studies in Korea to date have been limited to Korean-born English teachers, the present study may yield implications for teacher education.

This paper explores Korean EFL middle school students’ level of creativity and whether there exist any creativity level differences depending on English achievement scores with 102 students. The participants’ English achievement level was measured using National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) English scores, and they were assigned to basic (N=21), intermediate (N=54), or advanced (N=27) groups considering the scores. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was utilized as a measuring tool for creativity. The TTCT measures three factors of creativity, which are fluency, flexibility, and originality, and a MANOVA was utilized to check the participants’ creativity levels. The participants obtained the highest scores in flexibility, followed by in fluency, and originality. The significant differences were found between flexibility and fluency, and between flexibility and originality. The results indicated that Korean middle school students were familiar with producing ideas with diverse perspective but rather weak for creating unique and uncommon ideas. The findings also revealed that there were significant differences of creativity depending on English achievement level. Overall, the basic group displayed significantly lower level of creativity across all factors of creativity compared with intermediate and advanced groups, suggesting the need to provide more effort for developing creativity of the students with low level English proficiency.

This article reports the results from a truth-value judgement task that investigates Korean speakers’ interpretation of complex and ambiguous wh-questions in English to identify the role of first language knowledge and Universal Grammar (UG) in second language (L2) acquisition. I examine this in the context of strong crossover (SCO) configurations in English. The findings demonstrate that the SCO effect is operative at the advanced levels of acquisition but not at the intermediate levels of acquisition, supporting the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Ladiere, 2009). I interpret this as indicating that L2 knowledge of phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface is constrained by UG.

Second language (L2) writing from the angle of translation universals (TU) offers substantial prospects of empirical research, but currently, only limited literature explains what linguistic factors shape non-nativeness in L2 writers’ texts. This article claims to demonstrate that robust TU indices may predict non-nativeness, more particularly translationese from non-translated English texts produced by non-native scholars of English. The ultimate goal is, therefore, to classify text types using the indices of translationese, which will, in turn, signify linguistic factors of non-nativeness detectable in non-translated L2 texts. To this end, this study employed a collection of multi-factorial analysis methods to compare native scholars' L1 English corpora, respectively with two different variations of non-Anglophone scholars' non-translated L2 English corpora (L1 English vs. Quasi-L2 English vs. L2 English). The results provided evidence that most TU indices were valid to spot translationese as a signal of non-nativeness in expert non-native writers' journal abstracts. Additionally, the behavioral profiles of the selected TU indices demonstrated that the two variant L2 texts were clustered in higher mutual proximity due to intergroup homogeneity when compared to their native counterparts

The purpose of this qualitative study is to present how two 6th-grade students learned English while their homeroom and English teacher implemented dictogloss activities with them. The study participants were J(pseudonym) and Y(pseudonym) who went to S primary school located at an underprivileged area in a southern province. The following data-gathering sources were adopted: transcripts of the audio-taped classes, individual interviews with J, Y or their parents, the students' learning journals, the teacher's observation reports, and two-time grammar-related questionnaires before and after the study. The data were analyzed according to qualitative study traditions and the following study results emerged: 1. J and Y both focused on some grammatical forms which they knew well, such as proper verb forms, determiners, prepositions, past tense and reflexive pronouns. They sometimes however overused the forms. 2. Regarding their dictogloss-based English learning strategies, J tried to write error-free sentences even from the beginning but her pre-learned grammar or word knowledge kept her from listening properly; Whereas Y tried to comprehend whatever she could hear and she paid her attention more on learning than on errors. At later stages of the study, J did/could not enjoy dictogloss-based English learning and Y enjoyed the learning a lot mostly because of J’s stressful error-free writing strategy and Y’s stress-free learning-focused strategy. Some suggestions are proposed to promote dictogloss-based English learning at primary English education based on the individually different study findings.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of theoretical and pedagogical interest in working memory in the field of English education, and consequently a number of research papers have been published on the role of working memory capacity in Korean speakers’ leaning of English as a foreign language. The purpose of this study is to critically review how the existing research on working memory with regard to English learning in Korea has developed over the past decade in an effort to detect the patterns of research practices and to provide insights into future research. To do so, major research databases were searched to find related empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals and a total of 25 empirical studies were identified. The search results were first described with regard to participants, working memory measures, and targeted English processing and performance measures. The descriptions were then used to detect the patterns of the current working memory research practices with regard to Korean learners’ English acquisition. The studies were further analyzed in terms of how differences in WM capacity affect or mediate various aspects of English learning. The results of this critical review will be helpful for researchers in identifying the emerging as well as existing trends of WM and SLA research and thus, planning and conducting their own studies on the topic in the future.