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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.

This study attempted to explore how two EFL college instructors incorporate ChatGPT into their English-speaking classes. It specifically aims to investigate the use of ChatGPT prompts and its feedback. To accomplish these research aims, two instructors implemented ChatGPT in their English speaking classes with the total of 105 university students throughout the semester. Two instructors’ lesson plans, class materials, and recorded conversations through Zoom were collected and analyed with the content analysis approach and then categorized to recurrent themes. The findings showed that the instructors effectively integrated ChatGPT into their in-class activities and offered well-organized prompts for students’ speaking practice with ChatGPT. Reflecting on ChatGPT’s feedback with human teachers was also educationally significant, linking in-class and out-of-class activities. While ChatGPT’s educational potentials are beginning to be reported as add-on activities to the traditional English teaching approach, instructors’ experiences and perceptions of using it as a connecting factor in and out of their English speaking classes need further investigation. Based on the research findings, educational implications on the potentials of implementing AI technologies in speaking classes are discussed.

This study examines Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These as a contemporary reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Set in 1985 Ireland, the novel investigates the institutional violence of the Magdalene Laundries through protagonist Bill Furlong’s moral struggles with recognizing and responding to systematic injustice. The paper demonstrates that Keegan moves beyond Arendt’s focus on the absence of critical self-awareness by revealing how ordinary people can fully recognize institutional evil yet choose inaction due to complex socioeconomic pressures. Through Furlong’s sophisticated moral reasoning and eventual courageous action, Keegan suggests that the banality of evil paradoxically requires active moral imagination rather than simple ethical blindness. The temporal distance between the novel’s 1980s setting and its 2020s perspective enables a critical examination of how institutional evil persists even when individuals maintain their capacity for ethical judgment. This analysis argues that Keegan’s work compels a fundamental reconsideration of the banality of evil as arising from the tension between moral consciousness and structural constraints, offering crucial insights into contemporary manifestations of institutional violence and ethical challenges in modern society.

The purpose of this study was to develop and apply AI platform-based assessment criteria to ensure consistent and objective evaluation of university students’ English-speaking proficiency. It also aimed to verify the reliability and validity of AI-generated evaluations by comparing them with instructor assessments. Accordingly, this study examined fifteen AI-assisted English interview test responses produced by five students at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. The collected data were analyzed using the developed rubrics based on the TOEFL iBT speaking scoring criteria, and AI platforms such as TurBoScribe, Coh-Metrix, and Grammarly were used to measure four key aspects: fluency, variety, coherence, and accuracy. The research findings revealed that the instructor and AI evaluations were highly consistent in fluency, variety, and accuracy, while significant differences were noted in coherence. These findings suggest that instrumental support via AI platforms can significantly aid in maintaining consistency and objectivity when evaluating English-speaking proficiency. Based on the research findings, this study also proposes practical educational implications for integrating AI platforms in future English language classrooms.

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.

The objective of this study is to investigate how the use of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence, in a university English literature class affects students’ perceptions of this technology. Specifically, the study focuses on the students’ experiences with ChatGPT during an English poem writing activity, in which two approaches were employed. The first approach involved students creating their own English poems using an English dictionary, while the second approach required students to use ChatGPT to rephrase their self-translated poems and edit the resulting output. The results indicated that students found the structured English poem writing activity at a basic level to be easy, but they preferred ChatGPT’s faster and more convenient process and its use of natural and sophisticated vocabulary, grammar, and poetic expression with poetic license. Students also reported that post-editing with ChatGPT resulted in more seamless and higher quality outputs than direct translation. They noted that ChatGPT helped improve their English writing and translation skills, sentence structure and grammar checking, appropriate vocabulary selection and usage, natural sentence expression, and colloquial conversation.

This paper is to read Claire Keegan’s short story, Foster (2010), which is displayed in a timeless rural Ireland from a daughter’s perspective. Unlike contemporary Irish women writers who directly disclose women’s plight and inferiority in the family, Keegan only shows women and girls as they are, focusing on the quality of seeing rather than on criticizing a gendered and patriarchal society. To do this, Keegan uses the first-person present tense or the simultaneous narration which has the first-person narrator relate the events as they happen without any judgment and criticism. This narrative mode highlights the moment of change or realization, which is considered as an epiphany whose meaning in Keegan’s Foster is secularized by describing the narrator’s normal life, instead of the meaning of the “spiritual manifestation.” For instance, the well the narrator visits symbolizes her growth by drinking clean water and deciding not to say anything about her drowning. This moment of change leads the narrator to learn how to behave, what to do, and furthermore to cut across the gender divide. Also, the effect of the open-ending in Foster underscores the narrator’s development, after learning the virtues of respect and resistance from the foster family, the Kinsellas.

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.

This essay aims to explore the possibilities of alliance and posthuman community through the theoretical frameworks of new materialism and neuroscience. The film After Yang, directed by Kogonada and produced in 2021, poetically depicts a world where Yang, a techno-sapient android, serves as a companion to Jake, Kyra, and their adopted daughter Mika. Yang was primarily purchased to educate and befriend Mika, who was adopted from China. However, Yang abruptly malfunctions due to an unknown problem. In his quest to repair Yang, Jake delves into the unexplored realm of Yang’s memories. While the film’s setting portrays a multicultural and peaceful future, it subtly reveals a dystopian past marked by a war between China and the U.S., and Mika’s experiences of bullying by her schoolmates. Furthermore, posthuman beings such as clones and androids face violence and discrimination. Despite these challenges, Yang’s poetic universe of memories transcends his immediate reality, presenting themes of creativity and mourning as an autopoietic entity. This essay particularly delves into the new materialist and posthuman interpretations of Yang’s existence as an autopoietic being and his experiences. The essay concludes by exploring the possibilities of mnemonic alliance and posthuman community.

This study aims to examine Antigone’ role of raising a question to the state-oriented ideology in Ancient Greek, and analyze what it signifies to women in charge of the private sphere, Oikos. It also explains that Antigone the protagonist’s role as the heroine overwhelming male characters is intended to educate the audience the dynamics: a new public order cannot be realized without respecting the private world when the private world conflicts with the public world. Sophocles’ Antigone presents the problem as a family conflict through the confrontation between Antigone, who wants to protect the private sphere, and Creon, who prioritizes the protection of the state. So Athenian audiences can realistically consider the cause demanded by the state. In it, Antigone serves as a person who raises a question to the ideological coercion of the public world. Antigone shows that a woman’s voice limited to the private sphere awakens the dignity of women and the importance of the realm in relation to national power, even though the work adopts the typical image of women in ancient literature. In the end, this can be regarded as being in line with feminism’s politics of participation in the reality in that the woman educated the public on how to modify and supplement the male-centered political world.