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This paper examines Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Maud (1855) through the lens of Victorian geological epistemology, arguing that the poem’s unstable lyric subject reflects a uniformitarian conception of language and knowledge. Drawing on Charles Lyell’s theory in Principles of Geology that natural change is slow, imperceptible, and resistant to final interpretation, the study contends that Maud’s themes of indeterminacy enact a performative linguistic field in which meaning is constantly deferred. The paper argues that such instability of signification blurs the boundary between external perception and internal concept. Consequently, this blurring turns the lyric male speaker’s acts of observation into mere projections of desire, thereby estranging the male-biased gender discourse of the age. In the analysis of the second half of Maud, the paper shows how, in the absence of the conventional system of signification, a surplus of metaphorical images and the cacophonous performativity of colloquial utterances create a discursive space relatively free from established gender norms. This paper thus aims to read Maud not simply as a reflection of its historical context or a psychological case study, but rather to illuminate problems of language, subjectivity, and narrative instability through its engagement with geological epistemology.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of generative AI on Korean secondary English education, following the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022. Generative AI is predominantly used for reading and writing, a trend influenced by Korea’s assessment environment and AI’s technical capabilities and user accessibility. Research reveals that AI tools have differential effects based on proficiency; they significantly improve the language skills and confidence of low/intermediate-level students, potentially reducing learning gaps and implying the need for differentiated pedagogical strategies. The introduction of AI is also shifting the teacher’s role from a knowledge transmitter to a learning designer and facilitator. Furthermore, learners tend to adopt self-directed methods by using AI as an interactive partner for designing questions and revising work based on feedback. Overall, generative AI is a powerful tool for innovative pedagogical approaches and learner-centered education. To maximize its potential, future research should focus on developing integrated models that better incorporate competency-based learning models, redefining the teacher’s role, and creating new assessment methods for the AI era.

Essay scoring has garnered increasing attention in the field of EFL education due to its efficacy in assessing learners’ cognitive and communicative competencies. However, manually scoring essays often encounters significant bottlenecks, including a lack of scoring expertise, inconsistencies among raters, and substantial time demands. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes a Large Language Model-based Multi-Trait Essay Scoring (LMES) framework, which incorporates rubric-based criteria into the reasoning process of an LLM to generate textual justifications, referred to as rationales. These rationales subsequently guide a BERT language model in predicting trait-specific scores. Utilizing the Feedback Prize essay dataset, LMES demonstrates the effectiveness of LLM-generated rationales in enhancing alignment with human raters. Semantic similarity and hit-rate analyses indicate that the rationales closely reflect the rubric-criteria, particularly for meaning-focused traits. Additionally, the inclusion of rationales yields improved correlations between predicted and human-rated scores, and factor analysis of the predicted scores reveals a clear distinction between form- and meaning-focused traits. The findings suggest that rubric-based rationales enhance the validity and accuracy of automated essay scoring in EFL contexts.

This paper explores the integration of dynamic, learner-centered classroom activities in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) contexts, with a particular focus on elementary students in Saudi Arabia (KSA). Drawing on recent research that advocates for active teaching strategies over traditional lecture-based methods to enhance engagement and retention, this review examines how interactive approaches can empower students, break down learning barriers, and foster a more communicative and connected learning environment. Key techniques—such as role-play, dialogue, pattern practice, and storytelling—are discussed as tools for transforming conventional instruction into vibrant, student-centered experiences that support language and literary development. The article also considers critical factors influencing classroom success, including communication, classroom management, curriculum design, and teaching styles, while highlighting the importance of professional development and supportive educational policies within the Saudi context. Ultimately, this study aims to provide practical insights for educators and policymakers seeking to implement more effective and engaging language learning experiences for young learners in the KSA.

This study analyzes Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City (2022) with the aim of examining the social structures that constrain individual lives and the modes of immigrants’ lives shaped under such influences, drawing on both literary representation and philosophical reflection. Majok positions B and G, who represent Dreamers, as the protagonists. She foregrounds the active potential of individuals grounded in self-determination who reconfigure the conditions of life beyond identity categories such as class and race. The play argues that hope enables this transformation and should be understood not as an emotional choice but as a viable way of life in a world marked by constant despair. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of “ritournelle,” “simulacra,” and “desiring-production,” this paper analyzes the philosophical implications embedded in Majok’s staging. It integrates these concepts into a coherent framework and reads the characters’ experience of the ‘present’ as outsiders. It also considers Majok’s existential vision and the function of hope in the open ending. By portraying the protagonists as Dreamers oriented toward flight, Majok underscores that recognizing difference and enacting hope are essential to realizing a creative future.

This study examines how Churchill’s Cloud Nine dismantles the traditional heroic narrative and reimagines it through the framework of the collective narrative. Drawing on narrative theory, feminist criticism, and Denborough’s collective narrative practice, the analysis situates Churchill’s play within a broader critique of patriarchal storytelling. Act I reconstructs the hero’s journey through Clive and the codes of imperial adventure, while Act II disperses agency across multiple characters in a polyphonic structure. Key scenes demonstrate this transformation: the ritual offering to the goddess replaces individual pursuit with shared ceremony; Betty’s act of bodily self-acceptance grounds communal recognition in personal autonomy; and the purchase of a communal household institutionalizes collective life beyond patriarchal order. Together, these moments exemplify how Cloud Nine enacts the emergence of collective narrative. The study argues that Churchill’s dramaturgy not only disrupts the linearity and closure of heroic form but also experiments with “unnatural narratives” that privilege multiplicity and co-authorship. By emphasizing relationality over mastery, Cloud Nine offers a feminist alternative and redefines narrative as a practice of plurality, vulnerability, and shared transformation.

This paper compares Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian film Snowpiercer and Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, focusing on themes of class inequality, survival, and rebellion. Despite their genres, both works depict societies sharply divided by social and economic hierarchies, with a privileged few controlling a marginalized majority. In Snowpiercer, class division is visually portrayed through the train’s rigid structure, with the oppressed living in squalor at the tail and the elites enjoying luxury at the front. Protagonist Curtis leads a violent revolution against this unjust system, symbolizing a collective struggle for liberation. In contrast, Hemingway’s novel presents a subtler class conflict during the Great Depression. Protagonist Harry Morgan navigates a morally ambiguous world where survival often demands ethical compromises, reflecting a quiet, but profound, individual resistance. Examining how these characters respond to systemic oppression, the paper explores different modes of rebellion—overt revolution versus moral defiance—and reveals how both literature and film critique power structures and the human cost of inequality. Ultimately, this comparison highlights the enduring relevance of class struggle and the resilience of the human spirit in oppressive systems.

This study, grounded in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, examines the unconscious desire in the characters of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Jerry’s betrayal is interpreted as an Oedipal narrative in which he regresses to the Imaginary to pursue a primordial relationship with Emma as the archetypal mother, betraying Robert as the father. However, confronted with the threat of paternal castration, he ultimately accepts the Law of the Father and renounces the mother, thus betraying her as well. Robert’s betrayal is analyzed as that of an obsessive subject subordinated to ‘male bonding.’ To reinforce male homosocial desire with Jerry and conceal his homosexual desire, Robert betrays her and maintains male bonding even after ending his marital relationship. Emma’s betrayal is analyzed as an act of feminine desire that resists the male symbolic order. By refusing to desire male desire and destabilizing the Symbolic, Emma betrays Robert and Jerry in order to introduce a new form of desire. She becomes a Lacanian ethical subject who remains faithful to her own desire. Ultimately, while Jerry and Robert betray themselves in order to desire the desire of the Other, Emma betrays the Other’s desire to remain loyal to her own.

One of the outstanding authors in the great tradition of British satire, Alexander Pope composed Of the Use of Riches: An Epistle to the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst and “The Rape of the Lock.” This paper explores the masterpieces and discusses Pope’s concern and anxiety about the increasing threat from capitalism and commodity culture, which attempt to erode humanity and moralistic virtues. This paper examines a societal collapse and the regression of the traditional order evinced in An Epistle and “The Rape.” What is remarkable about An Epistle and “The Rape” is that they observe the massively grotesque and displeasing topic of a fall of morality with humorous and energetic imagination. In the literary landscape shown in An Epistle and “The Rape” money and commodities are nothing but the root of all evil; but Pope still recognizes the mesmerizing power of money and objects as well. This paper discusses Pope’s intriguing and curious efforts to keep a very strange balance between the love and fear of money and commodities. The contradictory pressures provide a highly charged literary intensity to An Epistle and “The Rape.” In Britain’s economic system, the virtue of moderation advocated in An Epistle and “The Rape” could solve the social, economic and psychological problems at hand.

This article examines the phenomenon of “outsourced memory” as a key dimension of the human-technology relationship, focusing on a series of Netflix anthology Black Mirror episodes that feature digital memory devices such as “Cookie,” “Grain,” and the griefbot. Regarding these devices as autonomous “machines,” this article investigates how they technically transform human memory and subjectivity drawing on Levi Bryant’s Machine-Oriented Ontology. This allows for an ontology in which memory devices and humans, nonhuman objects and subjects interact to form an assemblage of memory as co-constitutive actants. To this end, this article analyzes the ontological status of analog memory devices and the structure of subjective fragmentation in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape drawing on Deleuze’s conceptualization of “virtual object,” and then traces how digital memory technologies enable new forms of agency and the dispersion of subjectivity by reading digital memory devices in Black Mirror against Bryant’s conceptualization of “virtual proper being.” Ultimately, this paper presents a genealogical account of the technical mediation of memory and the ontological co-constitution of subjects and machines, revealing the ethical, affective, and existential implications of outsourcing memory to nonhuman actants.

This paper investigates the emphatic use of demonstrative ku in Korean. Demonstrative ku has been well-known to indicate a deictic as well as anaphoric definite meaning. However, not much attention has been paid to its emphatic use. Literature on this topic is scarce; there has only been one study in Kang (2018) that provides a pragmatic analysis of emphatic ku. This paper examines the distribution of emphatic ku in comparison with a stressed demonstrative nominal (e.g., that CREEP) in English. It is proposed that emphatic ku is similar to an English stressed demonstrative nominal by not being used as a focal element, but by being used to indicate emphasis, building on its syntactic, semantic, and prosodic properties. It is also shown that emphatic ku is distinct from anaphoric ku. Emphatic ku modifies an adjective as an intensifier, while anaphoric ku occupies the specifier of DP as a function word. In addition, emphatic and anaphoric ku are shown to have distinct prosodic properties: namely, emphatic ku has a prosodically longer duration and carries the LH pitch pattern associated with an Accentual Phrase (AP) in Korean prosody, while anaphoric ku is shorter and carries either flat or falling pitch, indicating that it does not initiate a prosodic AP.

This paper aims to investigate whether emotional experiences influence the understanding of metaphorical expressions about time. Korean college students were asked to resolve the ambiguous time question on different conditions of emotional experiences, both past and future. Two studies showed that unpleasant events from the past and pleasant events in the future elicit the ego-moving perspective, whereas pleasant events from past and unpleasant events in the future elicit the time-moving perspective. Specifically, in the case of English question, a reliable difference was found in the proportion of Monday and Friday responses across pleasant and unpleasant events from the past conditions, but it was not across pleasant and unpleasant events in the future. And in the case of Korean question, a reliable difference was not found in the proportion of the two responses across pleasant and unpleasant events from the past as well as in the future. I suggest it is because Korean people have a significant preference for the time-moving perspective in the interpretation of the ambiguous time question in Korean and past emotional experiences are more intense than anticipated future emotional experiences. The results provide new evidence for the role of emotional experiences in resolving temporal ambiguity in English and Korean.

This paper re-examines the syntax of control through the lens of the Miracle Creed Framework (MCF; Chomsky 2023, 2024), a derivationally minimal approach that dispenses with PRO and movement into θ-positions. Under MCF, control is derived via a single, phase-internal identity mechanism—External Merge plus Form Copy—consistent with the Duality of Semantics and tightly constrained by locality. This framework captures canonical subject control, oblique control, gerundive subjects, and adjunct control without resorting to null pronominals or logophoric anchoring, thereby highlighting its simplicity, locality, and theoretical economy. It also reinterprets phenomena traditionally treated as Non-Obligatory Control (NOC), showing that they follow from the same structural principles as other control configurations. At the same time, certain peripheral phenomena remain empirical challenges. Possible avenues for addressing these include semantic enrichment for PC and restructuring-based accounts for finite control, though such extensions must preserve the framework’s strict locality and identity conditions. The proposed analysis thus offers a unified and empirically grounded theory of control while delineating the limits of its explanatory reach.

This paper investigates the nature of the remnant in English pseudogapping constructions, an ellipsis phenomenon in which much of the VP is elided under an auxiliary, leaving behind a remnant, typically an object or complement. While previous studies, such as Levin (1979), Jayaseelan (2001), and Hoeksema (2006), have argued that the remnant in pseudogapping carries a contrastive focus, this paper challenges that view. Based on several pieces of empirical evidence, it is argued that the remnant instead bears information focus, in the sense of É. Kiss (1998), thereby aligning it more closely with new-information foci than with contrastive ones. This insight further motivates the claim that the Information Focus Phrase (IFocP), proposed by Cruschina (2011) as a TP-internal focus projection in Romance languages on the basis of insights from Belletti (2001, 2004), also exists in English. Building on this, this paper proposes that remnant movement in English pseudogapping should be analyzed as information-focus movement to the specifier of IFocP. Additional evidence from adjectival phrase remnants and multiple remnants supports this proposal, offering a more comprehensive account of pseudogapping than previous movement-based analyses.

This study explores pre-service secondary English teachers’ perceptions of their ability to implement competency-based education before and after a teaching practicum. The research focuses on the six key competencies outlined in the 2022 Revised National English Curriculum: self-management, knowledge-information processing, creative thinking, aesthetic-emotional, collaborative communication, and civic competencies. Nineteen pre-service teachers participated in preand post-practicum questionnaire surveys. The results indicated mixed perceptions of the practicum’s impact on their ability to implement competency-based education, with nearly equal proportions perceiving growth and expressing uncertainty. For the ability to implement competency-based instruction, statistically significant gains were observed only for the self-management competency, while no significant gains were found for the ability to implement competency-based assessment across all competencies. The findings reveal persistent challenges in developing abilities to implement other competencies, highlighting the importance of structured mentorship, theoretical preparation, and focused training in both instruction and assessment for competency-based education. Implications for teacher education curricula and practicum design are discussed.