Earticle

This study examines Martyna Majok's Sanctuary City through the frameworks of geopathology and algorithmic governance, focusing on how post-9/11 immigration systems reshape subjectivity, space, affect, and gendered care. Drawing on Una Chaudhuri's concept of geopathology and Ruha Benjamin's notion of coded exposure, the study interprets citizenship as an algorithmic structure that produces legality and exclusion. Through close readings of liminal spaces such as the bare stage and the fire escape, the play presents sanctuary as a temporary and unstable space shaped by surveillance and administrative control. The analysis further argues that care and intimacy, particularly within marginalized immigrant lives, function as strategic survival mechanisms rather than purely ethical bonds. Finally, using the concept of apoptosis, the study demonstrates how immigrant exclusion operates through gradual and normalized forms of systemic elimination in post-9/11 America.

This article explores how the narratives are constructed in the ordinary lives of individuals, rather than in the great adventures. The art of storytelling is based on the mundane lives, and the originators of a story can be the smallest beings. Not a hero, but a woman who does domestic life, not a human, but an insect who does humble toil can weave a marvelous narrative. In The Very Busy Spider, the spider spinning a web for dinner is the center of the story making. The animals’ repeated requests weave into a single story. In Metamorphoses, Arachne's provocative designs of weaving expose the violent transformations imposed by the gods upon fragile women. Penelope in The Odyssey uses weaving as tactics of survival through the deception of the suitors. Charlotte in Charlotte's Web weaves a web of language, turning the innocent Wilbur into a hero of an interesting narrative. Every weaving tells us that the simple plain lives can be an art of creation, for stories “never end.”(Tolkien 400)

Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House (2004) offers a profound critique of the neoliberal outsourcing of reproductive labor and the medicalization of death. This paper examines how, in the contemporary family structures, care labor and deathbed care (hospice) that had been outsourced to wage labor and medicalization are once again performed within the household. In the play, while care for everyday life and for dying is re-situated in the domestic setting, this shift is effected by migrant workers and physicians who had previously acted as proxies for the performance of care and medicalization, thereby posing fundamental questions about the outsourcing of care and death. This study reveals not only the ethical obligation of human beings, mortal yet living ordinary lives, to care for one another, but also the political‑economic structures of the post‑millennial landscape. The domestic space transforms from a site of outsourced labor into a sanctuary of hospitality and genuine ethics of care. Ultimately, by embracing the inevitable “filth” of life and death, the play stages a transcendence that reclaims human dignity beyond the banality of everyday life and the death that capitalism rejects.

Across Lady Gregory's historical plays, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Dervorgilla (1907), and Grania (1912), there runs the common trope of a love triangle between a personified Ireland, the Irish Man, and the Irish Woman. The repeated victimization of the Irish Woman as jilted lovers and treasonous adulterers, who place themselves in competition with their motherland for male affection, reduces them to apolitical figures in individualistic pursuits of romantic fulfillment. Such a formulation of female desire—as a purely individualistic agenda utterly incompatible with the nationalist cause—perpetuates ancient notions of apolitical womanhood, and calcifies the dichotomy between the realms of the masculine public and the feminine private. Notwithstanding the many feminist interpretations of the life and works of Lady Gregory, this essay critiques the extreme degree to which she isolates the two spheres from each other along the gender binary, denying any intersectionality between the two in Irishwomen's lives, and thus, excising them of all civic consciousness and political interiority. Such heroines deny historical Irishwomen of nationalist and feminist agency, when in reality, they actively sought to liberate both Ireland and the women of Ireland in the public spaces they shared with male peers.

While noting the ars moriendi (the art of dying) tradition that early modern women employed to establish their authorial voices, this paper explores how this trope was elevated to a new level during the English Civil Wars by two female prophets, Sarah Wight and Anna Trapnel. The unique cultural and political milieu of the period is examined in detail to highlight the distinct characteristics of these two writers, features that enabled them to distinguish themselves from preceding female writers such as Isabella Whitney and Elizabeth Joscelin. This milieu serves as more than a mere historical backdrop against which Wight's and Trapnel's writings were produced. Instead, the paper argues that it deeply informs the tenor of their writings and provides the necessary conditions for their multi-layered meanings. In the case of Wight, the urgent need for harmony and unity among Protestant sects is echoed throughout her writing. Conversely, Trapnel fulfills her role as a prophet by reprimanding Oliver Cromwell's tendency toward idolatry and warning of the dire consequences of his political pursuits.

Multicultural literature has been recognized as a means of self-affirmation and indirect experience of diversity. While studies question the authentic and balanced representation of multicultural characters, there is a dearth of studies focusing on strengths of characters. This qualitative study, grounded in the VIA (Values in Action) character strengths framework, aims to investigate character strengths represented by multicultural characters in Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks awarded between 1939 and 2026. Findings indicate that interpersonal strengths were most frequently represented, while strengths of prudence, self-regulation, and modesty were absent. An observation of trends reveals diversifying character strengths in recent decades alongside universal strengths persisting across time. With regard to ethnic representation, a disproportionate distribution was identified between particular character strengths and ethnic groups. These findings suggest that multicultural picturebooks are educational resources for social-emotional learning and multicultural education with the purpose of developing readers’ positive identity.

This study targeted students enrolled in practical English composition courses at Korean universities, presenting Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) comprising 570 words. It aimed to identify the scope of academic vocabulary that learners self-assessed as known and to analyze the correlation between this receptive knowledge level and their practical English writing performance. Specifically, students’ AWL recognition ratio (number of recognized words/570) was calculated and correlated with practical composition grades (midterm/final exams or portfolio-based total scores) to explore the extent to which academic vocabulary awareness contributes to writing achievement (Alhojailan, 2019). Accordingly, the research sought to provide a more concrete profile of Korean university students’ academic vocabulary recognition, empirically discuss the role and necessity of AWL instruction in practical writing courses, and derive implications for developing writing curricula, teaching methods, and learning strategies centered on academic vocabulary.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of subject/object asymmetry observed in the acquisition process of tense phrase ellipsis (TP-ellipsis), specifically in the structure known as “sluicing,” by English-speaking children. The analysis is conducted through the lenses of intervention effects and Relativized Minimality. Methodologically, this study employs Merchant’s (2001) PF-deletion analysis and the “What You See Is What You Get” approach proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) to examine the internal syntactic structure of sluicing. The research reviews Wood’s (2009) grammaticality judgment tests on sluicing sentences conducted with two groups of English-speaking children, and Mateu and Hyams’s (2019) experiments investigating children’s comprehension of sluicing and relative clause structures with 60 English-speaking children. This study aims to observe the developmental timeline in which children comprehend sluicing structures, to connect the subject/object asymmetry and intervention effects with the principles of Minimalist Grammar, particularly through Relativized Minimality, and to provide robust evidence for the existence of an invisible syntactic structure TP within the ellipsis site of sluicing.

This study investigated the effects of teacher questioning types and wait-time duration on the creativity of Korean elementary EFL learners in a remote video-instruction setting. The research involved 44 students (grades 3-6) at a Metropolitan Office of Education English Center, utilizing a dual-experimental design: Experiment 1 focused on questioning strategies (open-ended vs. closed-ended), and Experiment 2 examined expanded wait-time (over 5 seconds). To achieve comprehensive data triangulation, a quantitative design was utilized alongside a supplementary qualitative analysis. Quantitative metrics from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) were analyzed in conjunction with qualitative data from student reflections, teacher journals, and in-depth interviews. The findings are as follows: First, although questioning types showed no statistically significant difference in total creativity scores, mean score trends and qualitative evidence highlighted the underlying possibilities of open-ended questions. These functioned as a “creative trigger,” and their success was heavily mediated by the teacher’s affective scaffolding, including humor and a permissive attitude. Second, extended wait-time (5s+) led to a statistically significant improvement in fluency, demonstrating that providing the extended wait-time can effectively facilitate the quantitative expansion of creative output. While flexibility and originality did not show immediate statistical shifts, the extended duration reduced language anxiety and encouraged creative risk-taking. The results suggest that strategic questioning combined with intentional wait-time can effectively foster both quantitative and qualitative growth in EFL creativity.

This study addresses the lack of clarity regarding the receptive and productive vocabulary sizes, levels, and profiles of first-year Korean EFL university students in the Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Conducted over five years, the four-stage study first measured the receptive vocabulary sizes of 963 first-year students using the Nation & Beglar (2007) online Vocabulary Size Test. In the second stage, a subset of 126 students were assessed for controlled productive vocabulary using the Laufer & Nation (1999) Productive Vocabulary Levels Test. The third and fourth stages analyzed learners’ free productive vocabulary through a corpora analysis of 492 written essays and 492 spoken monologues by applying the Laufer & Nation (1995) Lexical Frequency Profile and the Moving-Average Type-Token Ratio (Covington & McFall, 2010). Adopting a cross-sectional quantitative design, the median receptive vocabulary size of 7,900 word families. Controlled productive vocabulary, however, was largely limited to the 2,000-word families level. Analyses of free productive vocabulary further revealed a strong reliance on the 1,000-word families level across both written and spoken corpora. These findings highlight a substantial gap between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge and suggest the need for targeted pedagogical interventions.

The study aimed to examine the perceptions of intercultural competence (ICC) among Korean university students (n=211) and their NESTs (n=29) by identifying the perceived importance of six ICC components, comparing group differences, and analyzing the relationship between students’ ICC perceptions and their English scores. Results indicated that while students prioritized IM, IK, and ATOC, NESTs ranked ATOC highest, followed by IK and SC. Comparative analysis showed that NESTs rated ATOC, IK, IM, and SC significantly higher than students, whereas no significant differences were found for other factors. Furthermore, regression analysis demonstrated that none of the ICC factors were significant predictors of English achievement. This result indicates a disconnection between ICC and English performance in the Korean educational context. Based on the study results, this study discusses implications and offers suggestions for future research.