Earticle

This study intends to discuss the storytelling of two animated films, Beauty and the Beast (1991) by Walt Disney Animation Studios (hereafter Disney) and Shrek (2001) by DreamWorks SKG (hereafter DreamWorks). The storytelling techniques that the two works employ follow the structure of a hero’s journey based on the folktale type AT425, ‘The Search for the Lost Husband.’ The story of AT425 involves a young heroine finding a wonderful husband through adventure. Bell, a country maiden, in Beauty and the Beast, and Shrek, a green ogre, in Shrek find a husband and a wife respectively after embarking on adventures. The two works also convey the ideology of each studio through the journey of the protagonist overcoming hardships and obtaining desired results. Specifically, Beauty and the Beast shows the conservative values in the United States of America. And Shrek advocates a different ideology, pursuing ‘political fairness’ under an anti-Disney slogan. Disney, which advocates conservative values, and DreamWorks, which parodies Disney, have played a leading role in animated films and storytelling while influencing each other.

This study examines death in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Death in Ulysses implies the contexts of Irish history of colonial occupation, the Great Famine, and Irish nationalist martyrdom. Joyce describes Irish society enshrouded in death, juxtaposing the death of Stephen’s mother and Bloom’s family. The Irish are fixated upon Catholic mortuary culture, and are paralysed by the memories of the dead. The Irishman Stephen Dedalus is obsessed with his mother’s death. The death of Stephen’s mother, who is nothing more than a victim of the traumatic colonial conditions, represents Irish history. Joyce criticizes this through the character of Leopold Bloom, who has a modern perspective of death and accepts death as an affirmation of life. While the Irish are preoccupied with memories of death, Bloom thinks as a way to obtain the vitality to live. His attitude toward death is life-oriented. Ultimately, Joyce emphasizes the mutuality of life and death and presents the need for the Irish to rethink attitudes towards death under the colonial rule in the early twentieth century.

Genteel Tradition is an old European culture deeply rooted in the consciousness of Americans, centering around a small and isolated group of Puritan settlers in New England. Originating from a small community in the early days of America’s national founding, genteel tradition is based on Calvinism, which emphasizes rigid moralism. This tradition refers to an outmoded and static old tradition of America that loses its foundation in a rapidly changing modern American society. In this novel, the tradition is symbolized by Mrs. Newsome, who dominates Strether’s moral consciousness. She sends her fiance, Strether, as her ambassador to Europe in order to bring home her only son, Chad Newsome, who is believed to have been seduced by an evil European woman. Strether’s journey to Europe from Woollett, Massachusetts is described as a growth in his perception as he breaks away from the prejudices of genteel tradition. In this novel, Strether’s morality, which acts on altruism, conscience, and free will, transcends the rigid and strict moralism of Puritan culture and is depicted as the ideal model of Jamesian aesthetics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which Art Spiegelman in Maus exposes himself to empathic unsettlement. Aware of the dangers of the ethical and ideological appropriations of the Holocaust, we examine three types of dissociation that the author uses in the graphic novel to refuse the reduction of the pain of others to his own understanding. First, Spiegelman dissociates himself in the face of the Holocaust. He throws himself into empathic unsettlement by wearing animal masks and using puns to disrupt the signification process. Second, the dissociation of the self leads to that of the world. By juxtaposing different time and space in panels, Spiegelman unsettles conventional borders of time and space. In addition, he places the system of representation in jeopardy by introducing photography into the comics. Last, the author disturbs the traditional narrative of ethics bifurcated into victims and perpetrators. He depicts characters who belong to an ethical gray zone and closes Maus with no consolation. Engaging in empathic unsettlement, he thus calls into question conventional representations of the pain of others.

This study explores the representation of disabled characters and disability in children’s and adolescent literature, focusing on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. These works can be analyzed with the term, ‘normalcy’, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal society to distinguish the powerful/strong/male/young from the powerless/weak/female/old. The disabled characters in stories are often seen as weak, obedient, and dependent on others. Their disability symbolizes passiveness, and is sometimes connected with the sign of evil. In “The Little Mermaid”, disability is a metaphor for weakness and passiveness. In some stories. the disabled characters have special talents. Using their talents, the disabled characters solve the problems they face and achieve some of their goals. In those stories, disability is a tool for making the characters grow up.

John Patrick Shanley’s semi-autobiographical Prodigal Son (2016) is a single-act memory play concerning a gifted but troubled teenager, Jim Quinn, who is a student at Thomas More School, a private Catholic institution, in rural New Hampshire in 1965-1968. Essentially a Bildungsroman, the play depicts Jim’s often difficult spiritual and emotional life at the school from his arrival as a 15-year-old from the South Bronx to his graduation three years later, focusing on his relationships with his roommate, two mentors, and principal antagonist Carl Schmitt, the school’s headmaster. Several reviewers at the time of the play’s premiere opined that Prodigal Son’s protagonist has a clear antecedent in Holden Caulfield, the teenaged protagonistnarrator of J.D. Salinger’s seminal novel The Catcher in the Rye. This article examines those assertions, and argues that while there are many deliberate similarities in Shanley’s play in terms of plot, theme and character to the earlier work, Prodigal Son also departs from The Catcher in the Rye in a number of significant respects and should therefore not be regarded as overly derivative. On the contrary, this article argues that Prodigal Son is, in fact, more faithful to the conventions of the Bildungsroman than The Catcher in the Rye, while the similarities of the former to the latter can be seen as offering both a homage to the precursor text, as well as a commentary on it.

This paper aims to reinterpret Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, through the lens of the railroad-cinema association. While Williams alludes to the railroad mainly through sound effects, Kazan not only concentrates on the visual images of trains and a railroad station in the opening scene but also keeps focalizing the railroad implications throughout the film. Kazan presents his film as a dynamic intertextual site in which Blanche’s material and psychic conditions as well as her conflicts with other characters are intersected with the physical images, light, steams and noises of the railroad and allusive implications of journey and junction. Using Robert Stam’s theory of film adaptation as a theoretical framework, I explore how these intersections in Kazan’s film serve not only to transfer the inner spirit of Williams’s play to the screen but also to allow the film to have an intertextual dialogue with cultural contexts behind the railroad-cinema association.

This study attempted to comprehensively examine the results of experimental studies which examined the effects of Task-Based Language Teaching (hereafter, TBLT) conducted in Korea through meta-analysis. To this end, TBLT- related studies were searched for and collected through an academic database, and meta-analysis was implemented on 75 research cases included in 21 studies. The results are as follows. First, the mean effect size of TBLT used for English teaching was .569, which is slightly higher than the medium effect size. Second, mean effect sizes calculated according to two moderators (school level and treatment period) were between the medium effect size and the large effect size, and no statistically significant differences were found between each effect size. Third, the mean effect sizes calculated by dividing the dependent variable into language ability and the affective domain were .538 and .587, respectively, slightly exceeding the medium effect size, and there was no statistically significant difference between the two variables. Based on the findings, suggestions for further research were discussed.

This study aims to identify and validate the latent factors underlying learners’ enjoyment in an online English language learning context with Korean college students. A total of four-hundred and eighty-four first year students from diverse majors participated in the study. Three instruments were utilized: a background questionnaire, the Online English Learning Enjoyment (OELE) scale, and an assessment of English ability. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted and confirmed a strong validity for the OELE scale. The results reveal that six factors are key to the online English learning enjoyment of Korean college students: online learning interest and flow, teachers’ attitudes and teaching methods, learning strategy use, interests in English-speaking cultures, social bonds, and effort and focus. This study also demonstrates that there are significant differences among high-, intermediate-, and low-proficiency learners in terms of OELE factors. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions are given for online English learning instruction to better foster language learners’ enjoyment.

In this paper, conceptual metaphors are observed regarding the pain of COVID-19 utilizing data from BIGKinds which is a news data analysis system. Metaphor examples are elicited using the keywords from domains FIRE, WAR, BURDEN, JOURNEY, NATURAL DISASTER, PRISON, and FRIENDS. The frequencies of the data are observed based on three stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. The results demonstrate that the FIRE metaphor is the most frequently used in understanding COVID-19 and the pains of the disease, over all three pandemic periods. The second and third highest metaphors are WAR and BURDEN. While WAR metaphors are more frequently used than BURDEN ones in the first period of the pandemic, in the second and third periods, they are less frequently used than BURDEN ones. And when compared with the first and second periods, the third period involves more PRISON metaphors and less NATURAL DISASTER ones. These changes reflect how people view the pain of COVID-19 as it prolonged over time contrary to the initial expectation that it could be quickly defeated.

Note-taking tasks can be considered a process to achieve communication by helping learners organize linguistic information they strive to convey through cognitive activities. To successfully communicate, learners must develop various linguistic and cognitive skills, such as advanced listening proficiency and the reconstruction of intended stories. This study aims to discover the major types of errors affecting university-level learners’ note-taking activities and a teacher’s scaffolding guidance in order to foster note-taking skills and learning strategies. Seventy-nine university students enrolled in an audio visual English class took part in this study. They were required to routinely carry out note-taking activities by watching both CNN news reports and academic lectures dealing with social issues. This study found that the learners routinely missed a substantial number of content words despite repetitive note-taking tasks. In addition, important phrases were omitted due to variations in pronunciation, unfamiliar proper nouns, and complex numbers. It was also revealed that students appeared to struggle with several abbreviations and symbols when reconstructing the meaning of the information. In order to tackle these problems, various teaching strategies were introduced and implemented to increase note-taking effectiveness as well as maximize learners’ confidence and help them more accurately grasp the content. Based on these results, this study recommends providing structured scaffolding for learners to perform effective and efficient note-taking tasks. This will have a positive influence on learning strategies. It will also encourage students to actively participate in tasks and produce well-organized information on given subjects, which require linguistic information processing.

This study examined the TEDster’s use of communicative features of stance and engagement in the corpus of a total of 500 TED talks in five different disciplines, 100 talks per discipline. In so doing, the stance markers in three levels of certainty and the engagement markers of interpersonality were identified, and the occurrence frequencies of the markers were statistically analyzed. The main findings are as follows: First, TEDsters were overall moderate in conveying certainty. Second they revealed their own individual self-identity more frequently than their collective selves-identity. Third, those in certain disciplines (e.g. art and design) used I to explicitly comment on their own achievements while another disciplines (e.g. politics and global issues) used we to implicitly reveal both their own identity and the audience. The findings showed the possibility of disciplinary-specific classification of metadicourse in TED talks as a popularized spoken genre.

This study explores words and images in the bilingual picturebook Aekyung’s Dream (1988), a story about a Korean immigrant child’s lived experiences in the U.S. Framed within the theory of postcolonialism as resistance, this study investigates how written and visual representations can invite students to become aware of the voices of Korean immigrant children in the U.S. Findings show that a significant shift in narratives and written/visual representations takes place in the picturebook, finally illustrating the counter-narratives of Korean immigrants and communities. This shift illuminates the retrieval and recovery of their identities and voices that have been marginalized in the U.S. What is further significant in the findings is that these counter-narratives serve as the rewriting and redoing of the assimilationist and hegemonic discourse that permeates mainstream U.S. society. This is followed by discussions, which shed light on the power of reading the word and the world through the story of Aekyung’s Dream and, thereby, have important educational implications for language and culture educators, who guide students to enter into the lives of others and also uplift them into multi-layers of the worldview. (183 words)

This study examines the acoustic interactions between vowel duration and intensity depending on the position of adverbs in phrasal verbs in English for Korean and American speakers. Vowel duration and intensity among types of adverbs are significantly different for American speakers. Vowel duration and intensity are greater for adverbs following nouns (T3) than for adverbs preceding nouns (T1, T2). With regard to vowel duration and intensity between nouns and adverbs, it turns out that the parameters are inversely proportional to the location of adverbs and nouns. There are no significant differences in the intensity of adverbs and nouns produced by Korean speakers, only in vowel duration. This comes to the point that the main effect on vowel duration and intensity depend on the position of adverbs in the case of American speakers. On the other hand, Korean speakers only indicate strengthening of vowel duration depending on the location of adverbs. These results indicate that it is necessary to teach the degree of phonetic reinforcement for conveying meaning depending on the position of adverbs in phrasal verbs.