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This essay aims to analyze and critique Deborah Smith’s translation of Human Acts, written by Han Kang. In the novel, Kang embodies and harmonizes polyphonic and poetic voices of the souls of the dead as well as the living who suffered from trauma inflicted by atrocious military oppression during the 5.18 Gwangju Uprising. Smith is aware of the precariousness of the translation not only because Human Acts is full of poetic and untranslatable prose, but also because it deals with a historic moment in Korea about which there has been persistent contention and misinformation. Still, rather than going through the difficulties of faithfully translating the original, Smith decided to remove significant portions of the original and modified it by deleting sentences or translating differently from the original. Rather than merely criticizing Smith’s translation or analyzing it in light of translation studies, this essay philosophically probes into core issues of translation per se, utilizing Walter Benjamin’s ontological approach to translation and Jacque Derrida’s deconstruction of translation. In turn, this essay furthers its critique on the cultural and political connotation of Smith’s translations with examples.

In Christopher Nolan’s second feature film Memento, protagonist Leonard Shelby is unable to make new memories, and everything fades after 10 minutes due to his mental condition, anterograde amnesia. Despite his memory loss, Leonard continues his search to find a past he cannot remember and his investigation to catch the criminal who raped and killed his wife. Although easily classified as a film noir, specifically amnesia-noir, Memento, unlike classical film noir, refuses to have a hero who finally finds his way back to a forgotten past where the truth is hidden, sets the hero free from a false charge, or restores him to his ordinary life. Focusing on flashbacks and photographs, this paper examines memory and past in Memento and explores several questions regarding the role of memory in the murder investigation, the nature of amnesia in the film, how flashbacks construct the past, and how photographs are used to represent the past. These questions lead us to see the uncertainty pervading the film. Memento no longer entertains the audience with an adventure of a hero who retrieves his memories and catches a criminal. Instead, flashbacks and photographs in Memento undermine the clear demarcation of genuine remembrance and false memory, and they present the past as obscure and the memory as unreliable. Most of all, the ambiguity in the film reveals the illusory aspect of a hero’s subjectivity.

This study presents a systematic review of empirical research on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in English education published between 30 November 2022 and December 2024, covering 50 studies. The review identifies the predominant generative AI tools, their educational functions, and recent trends in their evolution. Results show that ChatGPT is overwhelmingly dominant, appearing in 56% of studies, yet 54% of them did not specify the model version, raising serious concerns regarding reproducibility. Reported functions include pronunciation analysis, interactive dialogue, vocabulary support, automated writing evaluation, idea generation, and machine translation, with applications supporting integrated language functions showing notably higher adoption rates. The findings further highlight the rapid advancement of AI capabilities, particularly in processing speed, accuracy, and multimodal functionality. These results underscore the necessity of detailed reporting on AI model versions and experimental conditions to ensure reproducibility and to establish standardized guidelines for AI-enhanced educational research.

Confronted with the entangled challenges of the looming demographic cliff and the global pandemic, higher institutions have been engulfed with crippling crisis and external threats. Against this backdrop, the current research endeavored to offer a new Metaverse paradigm for English education from needs-analysis and meta-analysis results for non-fungible highfliers in metaversity. A needs analysis was performed to identify the English learning needs of 442 college students with varying majors; a meta-analysis of 37 effect sizes from 9 studies was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of Metaverse-embedded English instruction. The meta-analysis results revealed that the overall effect size of Metaverse technology for English learning is was medium and positive (0.419; 95% CI: 0.264∼0.5741) with the Q-value of 583.091 and the Higgin’s I²-value of 93.826. The effectiveness of Metaverse technology in promoting cognitive attributes was highest (0.845), followed by affective (0.572) and linguistics (0.062). The needs analysis revealed that students are in need of studying employment-related English programs such as TOEIC, English for job interviews, presentations, and so on. From the findings, this research proposes a new English education paradigm to forge ahead in the 5th industrial revolution(5IR) era.

This study explores the English scores of freshmen engineering colleges in two universities and the professors' and instructors' perceptions on transition of English ability of the students and the situation of English education after the change of English section of College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) from a norm-referenced to a criterion-referenced system. For this study, 10 participants took part in in-depth interviews through a focus group, and the data were analyzed through descriptive coding, which reiterated themes or issues that showed consistent or unique patterns. The key findings of this study are as follows. First, engineering students' English skills have declined after the introduction of absolute evaluation on the English section of the CSAT. Second, engineering students have a tendency to regard English as an insignificant subject. Finally, in regards to the entrance examination policy, rather than going back to using relative evaluation on the English section of the CSAT, it is necessary to absolutely evaluate all subjects and make the CSAT a minimum requirement.

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.

This article discusses the significance and limitations of the studies concerning English language teaching (ELT) published in English 21 over the last 3 years (2017-2019) as an attempt to identify the current state and desirable directions of research. A total of 59 studies were post-hoc classified into three topic areas: (1) ELT methodology, (2) teachers, learners, and social contexts, and (3) materials, tools, and linguistic analyses of learner language. Evaluative comments were made not only on the internal and external validity of each study but on the overall contribution of recent efforts in the three broad areas. This review also takes account of the ideological and practical limitations of language teaching under the doctrinal guidelines of Communicative Language Teaching, and speculates that language learning in the next generation (and the teaching thereof) will be largely driven by and adjusted to personal needs rather than social ones. Finally, some suggestions for future research are drawn from the discussion.

The purpose of this study is to explore the current state of interactive AI chatbot development, focusing on ICT based new technology trends, and suggest ways of applying this chatbot technology to develop English education chatbots. First, this study explains the major principles of AI-based interactive chatbot development in recent years. Second, it also presents the basic structure of the AI-based chatbot system and its application of intelligent learning processes in English language education. In addition, with the development of future technologies, interactive AI chatbots can be expected to be used in many fields such as personal assistant service, interactive commerce, and the entertainment industry. Especially, the chatbot system is expected to enhance learners’ foreign language competence and motivation in language education settings.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of Generative Grammar and understand the Minimalist Program advanced by Chomsky(1995), with specific focus on the concept of minimization. In particular, this paper introduces the philosophical and theoretical background of Generative Grammar and presents the core concepts of syntactic theories existing under the Generative Grammar framework. It also discusses which aspects of each theory have been changed to achieve minimality. Since minimization revisions had already been made to the Standard Theory, the Extended Standard Theory, and the Government and Binding Theory, this paper concludes that the Minimalist Program is not completely different from other theories but rather an extension of them, which particularly emphasizes the economics and minimality of theory.

This study explores not only Korean college students’ perceptions of employing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in a synchronous online course using Zoom, a videoconferencing tool, but also factors influencing their perceptions. Twenty students, who had low English proficiency taking Practical English III during the COVID-19 pandemic, took part in this study. Data from surveys and individual interviews were collected. Both descriptive analysis of survey data and thematic analysis of interviews with eight volunteers were carried out. The results show that students perceived the Zoom class positively with no preference for pair work or whole class work. In addition, there were two factors affecting students’ perceptions: the promotion of authentic interaction and participation in interesting communicative activities. The findings not only support the possibility of adopting CLT in synchronous online settings, but also suggest balancing form-focused and meaning-focused activities for beginners.