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This paper studies the most controversial question the critics of Swift have long disagreed about: who is the speaker in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and some odes, and argues that the question both gives all the complexities and subtleties of Swift’s satiric outlook and has a pivotal importance for readers to understand his satires. To answer the question this paper examines first the speaker of Swift’s early odes and then their relation to the satiric persona of A Tale of a Tub, because the early transition period from the writer of the early odes to the period of the prose satirist is believed to reveal the process in which the question forms itself in Swift’s mind and begins to become a creative foundation of his satire.

Indo-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry covers the interrelationships between country, community, and family through his ‘Bombay novels.’ Among these, Family Matters deals with various family issues such as a remarried family, a single-parent family, relationships between stepfather and son and daughter, old-age matters, and care and support in the context of Indian communalism. This paper traces how communalism in India, which referred to degenerated Indian secularism, resulted in the threat to religious minority communities. Moreover, this paper contends that the anxiety of one minority religion community, the Parsi, manifested in an obsession with “pure blood” as a survival strategy for the community. Finally, this paper concludes that the Parsi’s pure-blood principle, consequent to the perceived menace of communalism, impaired the family and individuals.

Virtue ethics has great meaning in that it embraces all the precious things of human life into the realm of ethics. Modern virtue ethics includes food, care, nature, environment, religion, and ethnicity, with the aim of enhancing the value of human life. Among them, food is one of the important factors in sustaining human life, so diagnosing literature as food ethics can be a new way to examine virtue ethics in modern society. At the same time, care ethics, which grew up in the late 1960s, also contributes to the practical and future values of virtue ethics because it focuses on social relationships and social values of practice. So, the work in this context sheds mainly light on the practical and virtuous life of Bishop Latour, who practices virtue to realize the ideals of harmony and communication through religious activities in chaotic New Mexico. For the reason, this paper examines the aspect of his efforts to turn back all ethical problems arising from food and care into practical ethics and contribute to the settlement of social ethics in New Mexico. Hence, it is to further expand the meaning of virtue ethics by showing that the implementation of ethics for better human lives can be realized as individual autonomy without distinction of any boundaries.

This paper examines the black women’s motherhood revealed in the circumstances from the colonial suppression and exploitation and their resistance to survive through Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Red Letter Plays. Because the Hesters in Fucking A and In the Blood cannot read and write but are only controlled and exploited by social ideologies, they do not have any solution to escape from their problems. These kinds of various suppression and exploitation from racism, poverty, lack of education and professional opportunity have taken black women’s innate motherhood away. Hester Smith in Fucking A is made or branded not to have any notion of motherhood. Her motherhood has been controled, learned and practiced to be absent. Parks draws the black woman's motherhood by making Hester kill her own son to save him in Fucking A. And she examines that the resistance to colonial power are continuing now. And this is to rewrite whole American black women's history and maybe the future story of black women who survive through the oppression as well.

Centered on the girls who leave their home and stay in the May of Teck Club in postwar London, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means depicts the lives of the girls, particularly their obsession with the slender body. Spark shows the girls’ attempts to lose weight and reveals the violence needed to realize the idealized slim body. Due to the national needs of wartime rationing and also the cultural norms that normalize the thin body as desirable, the girls torture themselves to limit their food consumption and fit into elegant dresses. While Spark mocks the girls’ efforts to be skinny and criticizes the social oppression under which they live, she also captures moments when they seek their own bodily pleasure and achieve what they desire. These moments are rare in the text but significant because those incidents betray the active and resistant ways of claiming the subjectivity of the girls. The essay first briefly examines the ways in which the girls internalize the normalized beauty and discipline their bodies. Since the female body has been controlled to manipulate their temperaments and oppress their sexualities for centuries, the bodily desires of the girls are also regulated by the dominant ideology. The essay moves on to Joanna Childe to explore the ways she practices her sexuality and relishes its pleasure. Although she is punished for her change of mind by the Church, and her desire is named as sin, Joanna through elocution freely expresses her repressed sexuality. By exploring the complex association between her vocality, bodily performance, and sexuality, the essay shows her pursuit of sensual pleasure.

The present study investigates the English learning motivation and needs among university staff and faculty members to put forward some pedagogical implications. To this end, a survey was conducted on 155 university staff and faculty members of a private, comprehensive university. The questionnaire mainly included demographic information, and questions on English learning motivation and needs. The the survey results were derived through descriptive statistics, chi-square test, independent t-test, one-way ANOVA, and the multiple regression. The results showed that the younger the age, the higher the English learning motivation and needs. The results from the multiple regression analysis divulged a positive relationship between the English learning motivation and age (β= .028, ρ< .001) and the explanation power of this multiple regression model was 69.0%. Moreover, participants’ preferred modes of learning were also collected and most of them preferred online learning to conventional face-to-face instruction. Lastly, responses to the final open-ended survey question offered participants to elaborate on their English learning needs. Based on the results of the survey, some suggestions are made on institutional support required to improve the English proficiency of faculty members. This study hopes to make a practical contribution to the field of language learning

This paper aims at exploring the differences of metacognitive awareness of reading strategy use among gifted learners in science, mathematics, and general middle school learners while reading English textbooks. In order to do so, 94 gifted leaners in science and mathematics, 90 middle school students in A city participated in this study. At the end of the semester, the participants were asked to read the English materials for 30 minutes. The MARSI questionnaire were administered to check the metacognitive awareness of reading strategy they used while reading the materials. One-way ANOVA was employed to analyze the data. The study found that gifted learners in science and in mathematics had tendency to use more metacognitive awareness of reading strategy than general middle school students while reading the English texts. Also, the gifted learners are more likely to employ sub-categories of metacognitive awareness of reading strategy such as global, problem-solving, and supporting strategies than general ones. Lastly, it was found that there were no statistically significant differences of metacognitive awareneess of reading strategy use between the gifted learners in science and ones in mathematics. This study suggests educational implications on the effective instruction of metacognitive awareness of reading strategy for English reading.

With the rapid development of globalization, the number of English learners increased as the day passed. Since we are now living in the era of knowledge explosion. In China, learning English is compulsory in middle school, while the period of junior middle school is the golden period of English learning. The teacher is an important part of educational system, and the status of teachers’ professional development concerns the teaching quality. Traditionally, teacher development programmes have concentrated mainly on enhancing teachers’ teaching techniques and skills, largely disregarding their real needs and demands. Therefore, under the background of new national situation and new curriculum standards, as the demand for junior middle school students’ English level and English language education has increased exponentially with the economic growth and globalization (Li Jing, 2010). Based on the teachers’ professional development in China, combined with previous research results, the writer investigates the EFL teachers who took part in national training plan organized by Baoding University in April 2019 and claims their needs of professional development. The survey revealed following results: 1. There are a few problems existing in EFL teachers’ professional development in junior middle schools, such as lack of professional knowledge structure and teaching ability, monotonous in teaching content and weak teaching ability in English; 2. The two major factors restricting teachers’ professional development are the work pressure and no ways for advanced studies. Based on the research results and the actual English teaching situation of Hebei Province, current study tries to put forward the ways of teachers’ professional development from three aspects: training, well-designed training contents and peer coaching.

This paper aims to develop an English curriculum for preschool children(ECPC) on the basis of Nuri-Curriculum and suggests a model of teaching English and some criteria for developing teaching materials which can be applied to it. The ECPC suggests that the contents of the ECPC should be toward actions and problem-solving, which is called ‘project’ in the classroom. The model of teaching English on the basis of the ECPC comprises three kinds of contents. They are Nuri-Curriculum as teaching goals, multiple intelligences as instructional settings, and hierarchies of knowledge as teaching methods. The procedures of the teaching model have the four steps, which are prepare, practice, perform, and assess. In the process of the model puzzles which are specially designed to have the children think in solving a problem are used.

Passivization in Chinese takes place by placing the active Patient in subject position and demoting the active Agent to the bei-phrase. There are two noticeable differences between Chinese and English. First, the transitive verb in Chinese remains the same in the passive. Second, the bei-phrase is obligatorily present, which is a significant structural indicator of passive. These structural differences are shown to yield a host of different perceptual patterns of English passives by Chinese EFL learners. For our discussion, we have taken a survey among 50 Chinese college students to examine how they perceive English passives into Chinese. In this survey, we asked them to translate 5 short passives and 5 long passives with the by-phrase. The survey results reveal that the former give rise to a variety of Chinese constructions such as accusative constructions, ba-constructions, ergative constructions, existential constructions, and middle constructions other than Chinese passives. The latter, on the other hand, are perceived as accusative constructions and ba-constructions. We attribute this to the fact that passivization in Chinese is not highly productive and the subjects are strongly influenced by the by-phrase in their perception of English passives.

This paper aimed to explore the types of English writing errors frequently made by Nursing College students. 4,220 English sentences, extracted from the descriptive writing missions performed by 420 ENP(English for Nursing Purposes) learners, were analyzed based on the revised version of 5 English Writing error categories suggested in Ferris & Helt(2000), Ferris(2002) and Lim(2018). Among the targeted sentences, 4 types of English writing errors were found. First, the most common errors made by nursing majored students were ‘mechanical errors’ like ‘punctuation errors.’ ‘Determiner errors’ rather than ‘Article errors’ were frequently found. However, ‘article missing’ before certain medical words, like ‘headache,’ ‘cold(influenza)’ or ‘diabetes,’ were frequently found. There was also the result of ‘misspelling’ related to technical terms like ‘appendicitis.’ Finally, the frequent incorrectness due to the misuse or misunderstanding of active/passive sentence, for example, ‘A patient was performed appendectomy,’ was often observed. This result of the study suggests that the teaching method of English Writing targeting English for Nursing Purposes class should be pursued based on writing error analysis. In this paper, a more effective way of English writing teaching is exploited for EFL students in the ENP classroom.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of grit on English learning motivations for college students with low level of English achievement. To achieve the goal of this research, for the quantitative research, the researcher conducted a survey of 154 students. Qualitative research was also conducted through interviews with four research participants. The researcher measured general grit(G-grit) and English learning grit(E-grit), and analyzed them. The results showed that grit levels of students with low English achievement were lower than those of average adults. The research also found that E-grit was lower than G-grit, which indicates students have less interest and make less effort in learning English than those of doing general work. The result of interviews showed that even though participants faced difficulties learning English, they tried to overcome difficulties and showed grit for remotivation of English learning. The results imply that fostering grit is needed for low level English learners to improve English learning motivation and make continuous efforts.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the syntactic text variables related to the item difficulties of CSAT through the indices in the Coh-metrix, the computational tool, using the 299 reading texts from the 2014 to 2018 CSAT and mock CSAT. The 299 texts of CSAT and mock CSAT from The Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation were made into corpora and the percentage of correct answers were obtained from EBSi website. These texts were analyzed by Coh-Metrix, a linguistic computational program, and then, the correlation analysis was conducted to find out what syntactic text variables have influence on the item difficulties. The results of this study are as follows. First, the more sentences with syntactic similarity in the passage, and the longer the distance between new words, the higher percentage of correct answers. Second, frequencies of negative expression was negatively correlated with the percentage of correct answers. Although there are many variables having an effect on the item difficulty and the rate of the correct answer, the objective figures of the text variables offered by linguistic devices is expected to be useful in successful predicting the item difficulty of the reading part in CSAT.