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This paper aims to explore the correlation between the pursuit of ideal father figures and one’s identity in The Odyssey, The Henriad, and Native Speaker. Specifically, it focuses on the recurrent representation of the relationship through the narrative structures commonly found in these literary works. The narrative structure consists of two contrasting journeys Telemachus and Oedipus take, respectively. They seem diagonally opposite within Homer’s epic, but the trajectories of their lives reflect the causal nexus between father figure and ego. Whether though pursuing or avoiding their fathers, they endeavor to overcome their identity crisis, which again reflects the connection mentioned above. Likewise, isolated from his father, Prince Hal regards Falstaff as an alternative father figure. Yet he ultimately sacrifices him in order to forge his identity as King Henry V ― an act that parallels the patricidal fate Oedipus tries to avoid. Henry Park finds an ideal father alternative in John Kwang after his father’s death, but he inevitably takes part in undermining his political career, a symbolic murder of his father figure. Repeatedly used in literary works, therefore, the theme and narrative structure signify the efficacy of them as a literary tradition.

This study examines how Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop reconstructs Martin Luther King Jr. not as a fixed heroic monument but as a vulnerable human shaped by fear, doubt, and moral complexity. By situating the play in the Lorraine Motel, the site of King’s assassination, Hall transforms the space into a performative arena where memory, history, and ethical tension intersect. Memory is presented not as a static record of the past but as an act continually performed in the present, reactivating King’s unfinished moral tasks. Hall draws King down from mythic elevation and reveals him as an ordinary, conflicted man, encouraging audiences to engage in active ethical reflection. Camae mediates this transformation and functions as a recurring moral guide whose final litany—“Iraq,” “NBA,” “High-paid slaves,” “Black Presidents”—traces the evolution of American society beyond King’s era. Through this gesture, King’s legacy shifts from individual heroism to a shared ethical responsibility. The recurring metaphor of the baton underscores intergenerational transmission and reframes the “Promised Land” as an ongoing journey. Ultimately, the play revives King as a figure in whom fragility and possibility coexist, urging contemporary audiences to sustain the ethical practice he envisioned.

This paper discusses how the nineteenth century American abolitionist William Wells Brown developed his transatlantic abolitionist rhetoric based on his travels in Europe. By closely examining Three Years in Europe (1852) and its American edition, The American Fugitive in Europe (1855), this paper explores how Brown’s travelogue served as his political platform to rally international support for the American abolitionist movement. The first half of the paper explores the contrasting rhetorical strategies in the original and revised editions of his travel writing. Represented in the two different versions of Three Years in Europe, Brown’s rhetorical shift reflects the author’s evolution from an exiled fugitive slave to a freed black abolitionist upon his return to America in 1854. The second half of this paper analyzes how the text transforms from a traditional travelogue into a strategic abolitionist tool by drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic.” Brown’s Black Atlantic consciousness shaped his creative intertextuality, blending documentary materials with works by European antislavery writers and reformers. Ultimately, I argue that his transatlantic perspective challenged nation-centered models of abolitionism and thus envisioned a hybrid, dynamic form of African American identity in a global context.

This study explores how African American poets have transformed haiku into a medium of artistic innovation, cultural reflection, and emotional healing, focusing on Lenard D. Moore’s Long Rain (2021). Building upon the legacy of earlier poets such as Richard Wright and Sonia Sanchez, Moore reimagines haiku as a cross-cultural form that blends classical Japanese aesthetics with African American rhythm, spirituality, and lived experience. This paper examines how Moore integrates traditional haiku principles—brevity, imagery, nature, and mindfulness—with modern and racialized realities. His poems reveal a delicate balance between the natural and technological, the personal and collective, and the Japanese and African American traditions by merging elemental motifs, color symbolism, and everyday scenes. The study argues that haiku serves not only as a literary expression but also as a restorative practice that allows both writers and readers to confront pain, find clarity, and experience renewal. Moore’s adaptation of the form demonstrates how art can transcend cultural boundaries and offer healing through simplicity, attention, and connection. Ultimately, Long Rain exemplifies how the African American re-envisioning of haiku contributes to a broader understanding of resilience, creativity, and the power of poetic form.

This study explores Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other, arguing that the novella can be understood as a textual embodiment of Levinasian ethical philosophy. Chapter II, titled “The Narrative of Ethical Reflection,” examines the protagonist Bill Furlong’s reflective awareness of social responsibility toward the Other through the framework of Levinasian ethics. The narrative depicts everyday ethics embedded in his ordinary life. Gradually, Furlong’s awakening begins with a direct confrontation with the suffering women confined in the Magdalene Laundry as a site of systematic evil. The novella exposes the Magdalene Laundry as a breeding ground of institutionalized child abuse and moral corruption. Their Levinasian ‘face-to-face encounter’ between Furlong and a suffering girl exemplifies Levinas’s claim that responsibility precedes autonomy and rational deliberation. Chapter III, titled “The Narrative of Ethical Embodiment,” analyzes how the protagonist embodies Levinas’s ethics of responsibility and caring toward the Other by rescuing a suffering woman from the Magdalene Laundry. The protagonist accepts an infinite responsibility toward the Other. In conclusion, Small Things Like These can ultimately be read as a literary text that embodies Levinas’s ethics of the Other.

This study examined how the level of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) affects learners’ perception of Foreigner-Directed Speech (FDS) in a Korean EFL context. Thirty-five university students participated by completing the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and then listening to two speech styles: standard speech and FDS produced by a native English speaker. After each listening task, they evaluated the speech on five dimensions: comprehensibility, confidence, friendliness, naturalness, and positivity. Participants were categorized into anxiety-high (AH) and anxiety-low (AL) groups according to the median of their FLA scores. The collected data were analyzed through independent-samples t-tests and mixed-effects models. Overall, FDS was perceived as clearer, friendlier, and more positive, while it sounded less confident and natural than standard speech. Compared with the AH group, the AL group assigned more negative ratings for confidence and naturalness, indicating that learners who have stronger anxiety levels may perceive FDS more favorably. These findings suggest that Foreign Language Anxiety influences how learners interpret speech addressed to non-native listeners and highlights the importance of affective factors when speakers adjust their communication in EFL environments.

This study examines velar softening, a morphophonological rule occurring in English words of Romance origin where velar stops (/k/, /g/) become sibilants ([s], [dʒ]) typically before a non-low front vowel. Traditional rule-based theories and previous constraint-based theories fail to account for the seemingly unpredictable nature of this phenomenon. This paper presents an alternative analysis using harmonic parallelism (classical Optimality Theory), arguing that velar softening is a direct input-output mapping rather than a step-by-step derivation. Following Lee (2004), I posit multiple input forms for alternating bases and show that velar softening can be explained through a set of constraints, including one that resolves diachronic opacity. To address a key counterexample, Isaa[k]ism, I further propose that lexical entries encode etymological origin (Romance vs. non-Romance), which can be represented in markedness constraints. Based on this analysis, the paper employs faithfulness and markedness constraints like Ident-IO[F], *SDOR+Suf1(R), *Sib+Suf2(R), SDOR-ɛ]w(R), and Max(SDOR). This OT analysis provides a more comprehensive and robust account of velar softening, capturing its patterns and exceptions without relying on a derivational approach.

Korean permits wh-constructions that violate syntactic constraints such as the Complex Noun Phrase Constraint of relative clauses, the Subject Condition, and the Adjunct Condition. It also allows fronting of coordinated structures that combine wh-phrases and regular nouns, constructions typically ungrammatical in English. This paper highlighted Korean patterns that remain grammatical despite infringing upon island constraints strictly enforced in English syntax. In English wh-questions, Korean ‘ceney’ and ‘hwuey’ are respectively reversed to after and before due to island effects and backtracking. Such strategies include generating wh-elements in the matrix clause or converting Korean -ki and -ko complement clauses into English infinitival or that-less clauses. Korean wh-expressions violating the Subject Condition are translated with whose- or which-NP constructions, while coordinated wh-phrases are mapped onto English forms with ‘wh-else+with-NP’. This paper examined how constraint differences in wh-interrogative constructions between Korean and English were represented and implemented in generative AI systems such as LLMs. Based on ChatGPT-5/Gemini results, the study showed that Korean in-situ wh-phrases were realized as matrix or monoclausal clauses in English to avoid island effects.

This study investigated whether sentence-initial pitch peaks increase proportionally with sentence length in both English and Korean, particularly under prosodic focus. We hypothesized that longer sentences would allow speakers to enhance focus prosody more effectively by raising pitch peaks compared to shorter sentences. To test this, production experiments were conducted with six native speakers of each language, who produced target sentences under neutral- and narrow-focus conditions. Target stimuli ranged from three to five words. The results showed that sentence-initial pitch peaks systematically increased with sentence length in both languages, confirming a positive relationship between initial pitch height and utterance length. This pattern suggests that speakers raise initial peaks as a strategy to accommodate longer utterances, reflecting a universal prosodic tendency. However, the increase in initial pitch height was nearly twice as large in English as in Korean, as confirmed by linear mixed-effects models. This cross-linguistic difference indicates that English speakers employ higher initial pitch peaks when marking prosodic focus, thereby exhibiting a language-specific prosodic pattern.

This study investigated Korean children’s awareness of English onset–rime boundaries relative to their awareness of syllables and phonemes, examining how these three phonological levels contribute to their ability to accurately map phonemes onto graphemes. A total of 101 Korean elementary school students learning English participated in the study. They completed three distinct phonological oddity tasks targeting syllable, onset–rime, and phoneme awareness, as well as a phoneme–grapheme identification task. The results indicated that the children demonstrated the highest level of awareness for syllables, followed by phonemes and onset–rimes. While a significant difference was observed between syllable and onset-rime awareness, the differences between syllable and phoneme awareness, and between onset-rime and phoneme awareness, were not statistically significant. Positive correlations were found between awareness of all three phonological units and phoneme–grapheme correspondence. Among the three predictors, onset–rime awareness emerged as the strongest and most significant predictor, followed by syllable awareness; phoneme awareness, however, did not significantly predict mapping ability. Pedagogical implications are discussed regarding early L2 literacy instruction and teacher education for Korean learners of English.

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the characteristics of Korean college students’ conversations with ChatGPT and peers in the classroom, in terms of turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair sequence, and sequence organization of their conversations. A total of 20 conversations from ChatGPT- and peer-based English speaking practice were analyzed through the Conversation Analysis (CA) procedure qualitatively (Heritage, 1984; Sacks et al., 1974). Also, Python 3.14 (2025) was employed to analyze the number of turn-taking, adjacent pairs, repair sequence, and sequence organization, quantitatively. Results of data analysis indicated that the students exchanged more turns in conversations between peers than in those with ChatGPT. Adjacent pairs of conversations were also found to have used a larger number of adjacent pairs in peer-based conversations. The students repaired 3.8 times in the conversation with ChatGPT while repairing 13.4 times with their peers. In the part of sequence organization, there is no significant difference between conversations with ChatGPT and peers. Based on the results of data analysis, pedagogical implications and suggestions for effectively utilizing AI devices in the Korean EFL classroom are presented.

This study explored the impacts of an EduTech-integrated lesson design practicum on university students majoring in English, focusing on three key aspects: digital literacy, EduTech-use efficacy, and attitude. Twenty-one students participated in a 15-week course that integrated various EduTech tools－Copilot, Nearpot, Goosechase, and Padlet－into collaborative, process-based tasks. The study drew on two primary sources of data: surveys and group interviews conducted with a cohort of 12 participants The quantitative results from the Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed statistically significant improvements across all three dependent variables. Thematic analysis of the interview data further uncovered multidimensional growth in awareness, including digital ethics, metacognitive knowledge, self-belief in EduTech utilization, and reflective practices－elements not fully captured by the survey data. A recurring, cyclical pattern emerged, suggesting that digital literacy, technology-use efficacy, and attitude mutually reinforce one another. These findings highlight the pedagogical value of integrating EduTech tools into process-based English instruction and advocate for instructional models that foster sustainable and reflective digital technology practices.

Drawing on Control-Value Theory, this study investigated how Korean university EFL learners’ control-value appraisals (self-efficacy, language mindset, and interest) predict their learning emotions, and how these emotions, in turn, relate to their English achievement. Sixty-two Korean EFL university students enrolled in an English communication course completed measures of self-efficacy, language mindset, interest, enjoyment, and boredom. Correlation analyses, multiple regression analyses, and ordinal logistic regression were conducted. Self-efficacy and interest significantly predicted learners’ emotional experiences; higher levels of self-efficacy and interest were associated with greater enjoyment and lower boredom. Language mindset, however, did not significantly predict either emotion. Enjoyment positively predicted course achievement, whereas boredom was not a significant predictor. These findings highlight the central role of control-value appraisals in shaping EFL learners’ emotional experiences in English learning. Additionally, it underscores the importance of cultivating positive learning emotions to enhance academic outcomes. Pedagogical implications for English instruction and emotional support in language classrooms are discussed. Overall, the study provides empirical evidence that fostering learners’ sense of control and task value can meaningfully contribute to more effective and engaging language learning experiences.