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Beverley Naidoo's short story “The Noose” from Out of Bounds explores racial identity and systemic oppression under Apartheid South Africa. Through the eyes of a young Coloured boy who the story reveals the psychological and social effects of racial categorization and the violence it breeds. This paper examines how Naidoo critiques the Apartheid's racial hierarchies by highlighting the marginalization of the Coloured community and the internalized racism that divides oppressed groups. Analyzing the symbolism of the noose and the protagonist's journey, it argues that Naidoo underscores the intersection of identity, power, and resistance in a fractured society. Naidoo addresses the suffering of the Coloured community, whose livelihoods were devastated by segregation and forced removal under Apartheid laws. While many narratives focus on the victimization of Black communities, Naidoo draws attention to the often-overlooked experiences of the Coloured population, who endured similar oppression. This paper explores how the Apartheid's policies shaped Coloured identities and critiques both the racial hierarchy and the internal divisions that arose within the group.

Claire Keegan's masterpiece, Small Things Like These, exposes the violence of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries through the life of a middle-aged family man named Bill Furlong. This essay examines how Furlong, the protagonist, arrives an ethically -justified decision through realistic anguish. On the surface, the historical fiction novella reveals the secrets of the Magdalene Laundries through Furlong's rescue of an unmarried mother named Sarah Redmond who is imprisoned in a convent. Underneath, however, the novel interrogates the shameful mechanism of exclusion in which Irish Catholic society and the residents of New Ross use to otherize vulnerable women. After all, the novel suggests how humans should offer hospitality to the other. It also defines the meaning of small kindness in this novel by presenting two aspects of hospitality: conditional hospitality, which otherizes the vulnerable, and absolute hospitality, which is represented by small kindness.

After the failure of Moby Dick, Herman Melville resorted to the format of a travelogue that had brought him success as a writer. In “The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles,” Melville relies heavily on such voyage narratives as Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and David Porter's Voyage of the South Pacific as the major sources of his novella on the Galapagos. This essay analyzes how Melville differentiates his novella from the borrowed source texts and transforms “The Encantadas” into a unique critique of human society instead of merely imitating voyage narratives. In the sketches portraying the landscape of and life on the islands, Melville seems to adopt the attitude of a Darwinian scientist. However, he rejects a single, hierarchical system of classifying animals and extends this attitude towards humans. Consistent with the meaning of Encantadas, where optical delusions and mirages can happen, Melville reinterprets nature and the inhabitants of the islands described in other voyage narratives from his unique perspective.

This study examines the factors influencing demotivation and remotivation in English learning among vocational college students using a qualitative interview approach. In the AI era, English proficiency is still essential, yet many vocational students lost motivation due to the exam-driven education system. This study explores how systemic factors affect students’ attitudes toward English learning and identifies key components that encourage remotivation. Semi-structured interviews were first conducted with 6 vocational students who had experienced changes in their English learning motivation. Then, thematic analysis was used to identify major patterns of demotivation and remotivation. The findings show that an overemphasis on standardized exams, limited opportunities for communicative English learning, and negative past experiences contribute to demotivation. On the other hand, exposure to real-world English use, personalized learning methods, and encouragement from teachers or peers play significant roles in remotivation. This study underscores the need for English teaching approaches that go beyond test-focused instruction to create meaningful English learning experiences. By understanding the motivational patterns of vocational students, educators can design more effective teaching strategies that improve engagement and long-term learning motivation. The findings offer insights into enhancing English education policies and classroom practices to better support vocational college students.

This study examines the patterns of Korean college students’ awareness of English phonological variation, focusing on six major subcomponents: contraction, reduction, assimilation, /l/ velarization, /t/ flapping, and /t/ glottalization. A total of 137 first- and second-year students majoring in nursing, health, and culinary arts participated in the study. The English Phonological Variation Test (EPVT), validated using Cronbach’s α, was administered in a face-to-face format, and data were analyzed using SPSS 29.0. The results revealed significant variation in awareness levels across phonological subcomponents. Participants showed the lowest awareness of assimilation (M = 5.96), followed by /t/ glottalization (M = 7.18), /l/ velarization (M = 7.94), reduction (M = 8.69), contraction (M = 9.41), and /t/ flapping (M = 10.36). Notably, students had particular difficulty with reciprocal assimilation at word boundaries, indicating a lack of familiarity with English prosody and weakened syllables in stress-timed rhythm. In contrast, /t/ flapping was well-recognized, likely due to consistent phonological rules, frequent exposure in media and daily life, and instruction based on American English pronunciation models. These findings provide foundational data for developing targeted phonological instruction and learner-centered listening curricula in EFL contexts.

This study investigates the effects of LMS-based monitoring on students’ academic achievement, participation, and perceptions. With the increasing prevalence of online education, effective instructor engagement strategies have become essential for maintaining student participation and improving learning outcomes. This study examines how instructor-driven monitoring including attendance tracking, assignment reminders, and individualized feedback impacted student performance in an online Business English course focused on TOEIC reading comprehension. A total of 277 university students participated, divided into an experimental group (n = 154), which received weekly monitoring and individualized feedback, and a control group (n = 123), which received the same content without monitoring interventions. Preand post-tests were conducted to measure academic achievement, and LMS activity data were analyzed to assess participation. Additionally, a student survey was administered to explore perceptions of LMS-based monitoring. The results indicate that the experimental group showed significantly higher academic achievement(p=.032) and greater participation in assignments and quizzes compared to the control group, while attendance did not show a significant difference. Survey findings revealed that students perceived feedback on assignments and quiz-related notifications as the most effective components of the monitoring process. These findings emphasize the importance of structured monitoring and active instructor feedback in enhancing the effectiveness of online education.

This study investigates the collocational patterns and semantic imports of past perfect subjunctive conditionals in conversational English by analyzing data extracted from the Brown University Corpus and the Kaggle Blog Authorship Corpus. The analysis focuses on identifying common forms of collocations and connotations that the conditionals accompany or constitute. The findings show that past perfect subjunctive conditionals are used to express a range of emotions and cognitive appraisals, with expressions of more desirable situations and speculative comments on event causality being the most prevalent. Formal features, such as the addition of an adversative but-clause, main clauses in interrogative mood, and the denotation of specific time points, alongside semantic features such as sharing of emotions, discordance between actual-epistemic and ideal-deontic states of being, and perlocutionary effects like humor and sarcasm, demonstrate the unique communicative and discourse functions of past perfect subjunctive conditionals. The study offers practical insights for learners of English and suggests that input materials reflecting the functional underpinnings of the past perfect subjunctive conditional can enhance their understanding and productive use of the structure.

This study investigates the resyllabification patterns of English intervocalic /l/ in the speech of native English speakers and Korean learners of English at different proficiency levels, within the theoretical frameworks of Selkirk (1982) and Kahn (1976). A total of 25 participants took part in the production experiment: five female native speakers of English and twenty female Korean learners (ten advanced and ten beginners). The study analyzed four prosodic contexts - word-medial onset, word-medial coda, post-stress intervocalic, and pre-stress intervocalic - by measuring the F2 and F2–F1 values at the temporal midpoint (5/9) of the /l/ segment using Praat and VoiceSauce to minimize coarticulatory effects. Results show that native English speakers and advanced Korean learners exhibited no significant differences in F2 and F2–F1 values across contexts, supporting Selkirk's (1982) resyllabification theory. In contrast, beginner Korean learners consistently produced higher F2 and F2–F1 values, indicating clear [l] articulation regardless of syllabic position. However, beginner Korean learners of English consistently produced clear [l] realizations with high F2 and F2–F1 values across all contexts, due to L1 transfer from Korean. These findings highlight the influence of first language phonology on L2 segmental acquisition and suggest pedagogical implications for pronunciation instruction.

This study investigates how Korean EFL learners produce English prosodic stress, focusing on the contrast between compound nouns and adjective–noun phrases. While traditional acoustic analyses have revealed persistent difficulties in L2 stress acquisition, they often fail to account for how learners integrate multiple acoustic cues in real-time speech production. To address this limitation, the current study integrates two complementary inferential approaches: traditional group comparisons (e.g., t-tests) and logistic regression modeling for predictive classification. twenty-six Korean university students were recorded producing compound–phrasal minimal pairs. Measurements of vowel duration, pitch (F0), and intensity were extracted and compared across stress types. In addition to identifying significant group-level differences, a logistic regression model was used to evaluate whether learners’ combined acoustic cues could reliably predict their intended stress pattern. Results show that while learners exhibited partial differentiation—most notably through intensity—they often failed to coordinate cues systematically. The regression model revealed that only some learner productions could be accurately classified based on their acoustic cues, indicating that many learners did not consistently coordinate duration, pitch, and intensity to mark stress. Particularly, intensity emerged as the most significant cue in group-level comparisons, while logistic regression complemented this by revealing how learners inconsistently integrated cues to signal intended stress. These findings may inform methodological approaches in L2 prosody research and suggest potential implications for pronunciation instruction and the development of AI-assisted feedback tools targeting suprasegmental features.