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This paper examines Paula Vogel’s approach to sensationalizing social issues such as prostitution in her 1981 play, The Oldest Profession. The paper focuses on analyzing how Vogel explores American culture and history to make sense of the lives of the five elderly prostitutes in the play. We resist empathizing with these elderly sex workers for their old age and their profession. However, this resistance can be overcome, and we feel empathy for them. This is what Vogel calls negative empathy. Vogel stresses the importance of negative empathy as a way of overcoming hatred for different social groups. To achieve this empathic response, the author gives her characters the voice to tell their own stories and demonstrates how their lives are shaped by the culture and history to which they belong. In the play, Vogel specifies how the labor of the five elderly women is devalued and how they struggle to survive in the era of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in America. The author’s handling of difficult subjects and problematic characters such as geriatric prostitutes gave her unwelcoming criticism from 1970-80’s feminist theatres. Nevertheless, Vogel believes as a feminist playwright, she should give female characters three dimensionalities that would present them as complex as any male character on stage.

This essay seeks to analyze Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner with a specific focus on its ethico-ontological and political aspects related to mourning and livability. The investigation draws from various theoretical frameworks, notably Judith Butler’s discussions on livability, mourning, precariousness, and cohabitation, as well as Jacques Derrida’s arguments concerning the ethical challenges of mourning. The Kite Runner attained instant bestseller status upon its publication, driven by geopolitical events such as the post-9-11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, commonly referred to as the War on Terrorism. However, its remarkable success raises questions about its apparent disregard for the depiction of American intervention and its repercussions. While the novel presents universal themes like father-son relationships and an Orientalistic portrayal of Afghanistan, a country largely unfamiliar to American readers before the post-9-11 conflicts, this essay goes beyond ideological critique. It strives to explore the ethico-ontological significance of mourning, focusing on the exclusion of characters like Hassan, which sheds light on the notion of Afghanistan’s ’unlivability’ for its people. Towards the end of the analysis, the essay also addresses the (im)possibility of proper mourning and the potential for cohabitation.

In this paper, Bong’s 2020 Oscar-winning film Parasite is examined in terms of how Korean subjectivity is shaped transnationally through an affective engagement with neoliberalism to evoke a late capitalist desire for hyperreal consumption of “all things American.” In the film, as Koreans internalize knowledge of and consumption of America as a hyperreal commodity, transnational American entities serve as the key currency of valorizing their class-based ontology against the non-diegetic backdrop of the US empire. Like other Korean filmmakers of his generation, Bong found Hollywood through the transnational flow of American culture, which was originally mediated by the US military presence in Korea. Bong’s positive identity as a neoliberal elite leading K-movies in terms of Hallyu is the obverse of his neocolonial affectivity, a transnational creole whose Korean subjectivity has been transversally Americanized in the empire. The co-presence of America in Korea as a transnational flow of neoliberal potentials surfaces in duality: that America is both the object of neoliberal desire for Koreans to simulate and emulate and a rendered equivalent to the structural faults of neoliberalism they perceive necessary to overthrow. In the film, this results in the gruesome event of a serial killing against the backdrop of a fancy birthday party.

Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan in 1954 but raised in England, explores the boundaries of human nature and artificial intelligence in his latest work, Klara and the Sun(2021). With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Ishiguro raises questions and concerns about the coexistence of AI and humans, throwing profound inquiries into the dignity, existence, and essence of humanity that may arise from future technological advancements. Klara, an AF(Artificial Friend), wondered if AFs were happy with their child and with their home and she would feel pain alongside her happiness. Klara possesses distinguishably cognitive sensitivity that other robots lack and raises questions about the relationship between humans and robots and about the robot’s own identity. Through the questions posed by Klara, Ishiguro emphasizes the recovery of humanity and ethical consciousness through Krissie, Josie’s mother, who manipulates Klara to become Josie. Klara not only agrees to be Josie herself but prays to the Sun for Josie’s recovery. The author presents deep emotional impact and thought-provoking moments and skillfully conveys universal themes such as humanity and the rights of human life.

This paper examines Ha Jin’s literary works that represent his transitional moments from a Chinese writer to a Chinese American writer: The Crazed (2002), War Trash (2004), A Free Life (2007), The Writer as Migrant (2008), and A Good Fall (2009). It considers how Jin’s emergence and growth as a diasporic writer is embodied through his characters’ trajectories of transnational migration across/beyond borders. This theme is analyzed under the topic of departure, arrival, and/or return, a common theme in diaspora literature. The departure and arrival of Chinese people in diaspora is not a linear and one-time event in their lives. They rather need to tackle it continually, perhaps until they may feel a full sense of belonging. This, however, is not a condition of life that can be easily fulfilled by people in diaspora. Hence, Jin’s Chinese people in diaspora are depicted as selves situated in between the tension between the national and the transnational and agonizingly coming to terms with such tension enduringly. This becomes their existential life condition that contributes to the formation of their diasporic identities. Jin also shows how he tackles such an existential life condition as a writer in exile and how such struggle enables him to deal with the theme of return and create an imaginary homeland in/through his diasporic writing.

This paper investigates Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons, focusing on the gradual changes occurring in her ecopoetics expressed through the poetry collection. In her earlier poems, Oliver refrains from crossing boundaries between humans and nature, and shows respect toward diverse elements constituting nature. Then, in the poems contained in Twelve Moons, Oliver’s poetic speaker starts to pursue intimate connection with nature, glancing at a possibility of going “into the body of another,” which characterizes her later poetry. The deployment of personification in “The Black Snake” signifies the beginning of Oliver’s direct contact with nature and her desire to imitate the perfectness of natural beings. In “Bone Poem,” she further develops an anti-dualistic view of nature, in which all the creatures exist in inter-connected relations and ultimately get unified in the process of cyclic circulation. Finally, Oliver attempts an imagined “transformation” into natural things in “Aunt Leaf” albeit temporarily, bordering on the experience of going “into the body of another.” These poems testify Oliver’s scrupulous pursuits to approach and interact with nature, which still provide valuable lessons in the contemporary world suffering tremendously from human beings’ ill-constructed relationships with nature.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between text formats and an ambiguous question about time in English and Korean. All of the studies about the ambiguous time question on different days of the week (Monday or Friday) for Korean participants rely on paragraph text for presenting the text materials. Thus, it is necessary to compare spoken and written formats and investigate effects of the text format itself. The experiment investigates whether text format differences in spoken in person and paragraph text formats contribute to Koreans’ interpretation of the ambiguous question about time. In the experiment, participants are asked the question that produces different responses depending on the metaphor participants adopt in spoken and written formats. The results of the experiment indicate that Korean participants have a baseline preference for the time-moving metaphor, with a stronger preference in spoken rather than written format in both English and Korean and the Korean condition yields more Monday responses. In a natural communicative state, Korean speakers are more likely to make use of the time-moving metaphor, understanding time as moving forward towards the ego. The results provide new evidence of the effects of the text format itself on the interpretation of the ambiguous time question in English and Korean.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the variation of alveolar plosives between vowels and glides across word boundaries in American English using data from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech (Pitt et al. 2007) and a Maximum Entropy grammar (Hayes and Wilson 2008) framework. Through corpus analysis, we found that {t,d}-deletion, glottalization, flapping, and palatalization were the main variants in the sequences. A total of 5 types of variation were set by adding the case of no variation, and the distribution of variation according to voice of alveolar plosives and the type of glides (/w/ or /j/) that followed was examined. As a result, we observed that /t/ followed by /w/ predominantly showed glottalization, while with /d/ most remained unchanged. The /t/ and /j/ sequence revealed a rich set of variations, whereas /d/ followed by /j/ mostly remained unchanged or palatalized. Utilizing the MaxEnt grammar, we used the observed frequencies, constraint violations, and constraint weights to predict variant probability distributions. The probabilities predicted by MaxEnt grammar largely mirror the distributions observed in the Buckeye corpus, though some minor discrepancies were noted.

Pires (2006) argues that Acc-ing and PRO-ing constructions belong to the same type of gerunds, namely clausal gerunds (CGs), and that the subject of CGs can be either a null subject (=PRO) or an overt DP with accusative Case. To account for this alternation, he adopts the mechanism of the movement theory of control. This paper argues that Pires’ (2006) analysis of CGs is problematic theoretically and empirically. Especially, the empirical data presented in this paper, which concern the ECM infinitival complement of consider, Subj-Aux inversion, the interpretation ambiguity of some PRO-ing gerunds, extraposition, and forming time adverbials, clearly suggest that Acc-ing and PRO-ing constructions behave differently in syntax. Based on these pieces of evidence, this paper concludes that the Pires’ (2006) movement analysis of PRO-ing constructions, suggested to integrate them with Acc-ing constructions under the name of CGs, should be abandoned. By extension, the movement analysis of the so-called TP-defective gerunds, suggested in order not to turn them counterexamples to Pires’ (2006) analysis, also should be abandoned. Then, their peculiar property of taking only the null subject is directly related to the predicates’ selection.

This study moved onto online fully and conducted flipped learning at university English composition courses. The purpose of this study is to examine changes that flipped learning in a college fully online setting makes in students’ English writing performance and affective domains (self-directed learning attitude and writing anxiety). For the purposes of this study, group and individual writing samples were collected at the beginning and end of the semester in the spring of 2021. In the same manner, questionnaires from 46 students were gathered twice. The data was analyzed by using paired samples t-test to look into differences in writing performances and responses in the questionnaires. Additionally, focus-group interviews were conducted. The results of the study, first, indicated that there were significant differences in students’ writing performances except for ‘mechanics’ component for group writing. Next, significant changes were revealed in self-directed learning attitude except for ‘self-directedness’ sub-construct, and writing anxiety. In conclusion, fully online flipped learning was, in general, found effective in English writing, self-directed learning attitude, and writing anxiety. Pedagogical implications are discussed for teachers interested in implementing flipped learning in a fully online setting.

This paper aims at investigating the cause-and-effect relationship among classroom community, self-efficacy and academic ability in a group of four-year college students. The 167 participants took a fifteen-week course of English classes and completed a questionnaire on self-efficacy and classroom community. T-tests, ANOVA and multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships among all variables. The findings showed that, first, confidence, connectedness and learning were statistically significant predictors when comparing subcategories of self-efficacy and classroom community between gender. Second, among subcategories of self-efficacy and classroom community, confidence and learning were statistically meaningful indicators of academic ability. Third, all the subcategories in self-efficacy and connectedness in classroom community were statistically meaningful indicators of academic ability. Finally, multiple regression analyses predicted that confidence and interdependence have a cause-and-effect relationship in college students’ academic ability. In conclusion, the casual relationship among confidence and interdependence and academic ability was found to be definite. Implications for the practical class and further effective studies are suggested.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of various sentence memorization methods on the improvement of English proficiency in second language (L2) learners. 24 students participated in the study, and over the course of 4 weeks, scores for comparative analysis were obtained using various methods such as silent reading, sentence writing, memorization through personal speech, and recording and listening to one’s own voice. Different content was used for each topic, and the 24 students alternated between memorization methods each week, experimenting with all the techniques provided. Memorization through personal speaking was found to be the most effective method. Next, writing sentences, listening to recordings of one’s own voice, and silent reading were ranked in order of effectiveness. Interestingly, the reason why the score for the self-speech method was lower despite using the same voice proves that the higher the frequency of the voice, the more helpful it is in memorization. Conversely, the low-frequency nature of recorded speech resulted in reduced learning effectiveness due to reliance on auditory filtering. This study highlights the importance of choosing an appropriate memorization method for learners who want better results in foreign language learning.

The purpose of this research is to explore the attitudes of Korean college English majors toward the quality of machine translation (MT), its effectiveness in language learning, and to gather suggestions for potential improvements. This study involved 63 English major students who had completed at least one semester of English writing courses or had prior experience using MT in their individual learning. The online-based survey was conducted at the end of the semester, and the collected data were analyzed using JAMOVI, an open-source statistical software program. The results of data analysis revealed the following findings: 1) participants’ satisfaction with the quality of machine translation was relatively low, with a mean score of 2.66 out of 5; 2) the mean scores for learning and feedback effectiveness of using MT were 3.33 and 3.79, respectively, which were somewhat higher than the satisfaction level for the MT quality; 3) The mean score for the seven questions regarding suggestions for potential improvements was 4.07. This indicates a strong emphasis on the necessity for improving the quality of MT. Based on these research findings, pedagogical implications for the effective use of MT in English writing classes were proposed.

Despite the NELAT (National English Listening Ability Test) being administered for nearly 40 years, pedagogical resources that effectively employ its question items remain scant. The purpose of the study is to develop pedagogical teaching materials for middle school students based on the question items from the NELAT of 2022. A balanced communicative competence was prioritized when developing materials, striving for an integration of the four language skills. This approach underscores the importance of both linguistic accuracy and fluency in the learner’s English language acquisition. Ultimately, this research endeavors to serve as a pedagogical guide for English educators, offering a model lesson plan that can be readily applied in their classrooms. The created lesson plans are composed of four sessions. First, students practice the dialogue from NELAT using the application ‘Speaking Class.’ Second, students write their own dialogue scripts with their partners. Third, students make videos about Korean cultural attractions and activities. Fourth, they give a speech about the cultural events in Korea. Finally, the paper discusses how pedagogical efficacy of the NELAT can be improved and how English teachers can utilize NELAT to create teaching materials which can be used to improve students’ English proficiency levels.