• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.129-150
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• 2009

This paper attempts to examine the effect of children's English stories on the development of Korean EFL primary school learners' listening and speaking competences and their motivation to learn English. This paper also discusses factors of English children's stories that make EFL learners' language learning efficient. Participants were 120 primary school students who attend one of the elementary schools in Chungnam province. They were randomly chosen and divided into two groups: experimental and control groups. In order to collect data, students' listening and speaking proficiency pre- and post-tests and the pre- and post-questionnaires regarding the participants' motivation to learn English were administered. The data were analyzed by ANOVA. The results indicate that the application of English children's stories to EFL learning settings can be an efficient way to improve EFL learners' listening and speaking competences and motivation to learn their target language. The findings of this study suggest that English children's stories provide language learners with interest, meaningful and authentic contexts and enjoyment. The pedagogical suggestion and implications are provided for EFL educators and teachers.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.305-333
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of teaching English through the techniques of storytelling with dramatization upon children's competence of English speaking and listening. These techniques are considered to enable children to have ample opportunity of use in and exposure to English, as well as interest. This study is sequenced as selecting stories by way of consulting literatures, developing a teaching model for practising classes through storytelling with dramatization, and analyzing the data resulting from the pre- and post-listening/speaking tests using the SPSS program. The results of this study can be summarized as follows: the experimental group shows better significance than the control one in the listening and speaking post-test. Therefore, literary units also need to be incorporated into English textbooks in order to improve children's aural-oral competence through the storytelling with dramatization.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.189-215
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• 2008

This study proposes using children's literature as a means of teaching and learning English as a foreign language and suggests practical strategies on the basis of transactional theory of reading suggested by Rosenblatt (1994, 1995). This study suggests three novels written for children or young adults: On My Honor (1986) by Marion Dane Bauer, The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry and Hatchet (1987) by Gary Paulsen. These texts were selected because of their diverse topics, easy and comprehensible language, engaging stories, and authentic and rich expressions, making them effective materials for foreign language learners. This paper is organized as follows: First, it reviews research on teaching literature in English education and response-oriented language teaching to provide theoretical background of literature-based language teaching and learning. Second, it provides the background of the texts selected for the study. Third, it develops diverse, practical strategies for instructors who intend to use children's literature in EFL teaching. We expect to guide EFL instructors in adopting children's literature in their English class by connecting theory and practice and by providing diverse methods and strategies, and sample responses by EFL university students.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.501-517
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• 2010

This paper examines the British imperialism found in Edith Nesbit's fantasy stories by looking at the function of magic and of the hierarchical relationships seen in the books. Although Edith Nesbit is relatively unknown in Korea, she is widely recognized as having had a great influence on the 20th century British literary world, and is also well-known for her political position as a socialist. Nesbit's fantasy books are commonly differentiated from other Victorian children's books written before her in that she created realistic and liberal children characters and rejected the adult didactic tone. While Nesbit's books have been recognized as revolutionary and being distinguished from other Victorian children's books, I suggest that the ideas found in her fantasy novels largely include the dominant Victorian message of British imperialism. This imperial ideology is delivered by the logic of magic and the multilateral hierarchies. The two magic creatures (The Psammead and the Phoenix) and the two magic items from an Oriental background (the Carpet and the Amulet) all have a magic power to grant people's wishes, wholeheartedly exercising their power and knowledge for the sake of the British characters. While the magic agents serve to fulfill the children's wishes, the children aim to please their parents and to benefit their family, showing layered hierarchies among the characters. Also, there is a hierarchical distinction between the magic items and the magic creatures in that the magic items have no voice to express themselves but only serve and obey the British children. The foreign characters that the children encounter in their adventures also cooperate with the British characters to help them to fulfill their goals. In short, magic frees the children from the adult-centered world but ultimately their free adventures serve their parents and other adults, and represent the ideals and hierarchical concepts of British imperialism. Thus, Nesbit's position as a modern writer seems to be ambiguous, switching between modern characterization and style, and the old Victorian imperial messages that also exist in her fantasy novels.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.79-101
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• 2010

In "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Derrida notices that he is being watched by his cat. He becomes ashamed of being naked in front of his cat. The sense of shame is a response to being reduced to the level of an animal. He is ashamed of being as naked as an animal. His next move is, therefore, to cover his nakedness from the gaze of his cat. By contrast, he realizes, the animal is not self-conscious of being naked and so does not shield its nudity. In a truer sense, then, the cat is not naked. Humans do not see animals for what they really are but what they project on them. Whereas the gap between man and animal is clearly identified by Derrida's philosophical discourse, the possibility of going beyond the gap can be suggested by fantasy stories in children's literature. Children's literature in Britain arose in the eighteenth century with the revival of traditional fairy tales and growth of literary fairy tales. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century contributed to opening up a new horizon for the concept of the child, in which the child is no longer defined as the object to be tamed and childhood imagination is glorified as a powerful means to reach the higher state, the spiritual origin prior to separation of Man from the 'thing-in-itself.' In The Wind in the Willows, animals talk and behave like humans. The anthropomorphic figuration of animals can be understood as a result of the one-sided projection of anthropocentric perspectives on animals rather than an interaction between humans and animals. Significant contradictions also emerge in this story, however, as traits particular to animals are vividly delineated even as the main didactic theme of good triumphing over evil reflects an anthropocentric projection on animals. An attempt to capture the true characteristics of animals and locate them in the text constitutes a remarkable achievement in The Wind in the Willows. This can be evaluated as an important step toward a more ecopocentric perspective on animals which appears in later children's fantasies like Charlotte's Web.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.597-618
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• 2010

This paper discusses American disability theater's representations of disability identity and disability identity politics. Dramatists John Belluso and Lynn Manning, among others, present characters with disabilities who experience oppressions at multiple, interlocking levels of domination on the basis of disability, race, and ethnicity. In Manning's Shoot, the black, blind hero iterates episodes in which he experienced discrimination and insults in encounters with whites who used derogatory racist words or belittled him and with some school children who taunted him for just being blind. This play, as in Manning's solo performance, Weights, presents narratives of a blind person traversing multiple locations of oppression in "a long litany of losses" in a white-dominated and ableist society. Belluso's Gretty Good Time similarly weaves together stories of disabled women, Gretty and Hideko, who bond together to resist the dominant ideology that reduces them into titillating commodities of mass consumption. Hideko's story serves the two-fold function of both affirming the specificity of her individual experience as an ethnic other and espousing the communal experience of stigmatization she shares with other disabled women like Gretty. In these plays, the intersection of the identity categories of disability, race, and ethnicity highlights the diversity of the body and the fluidity of boundaries, foregounding the specificity of disabled bodies, while at the same time overthrowing the hierarchical binarism between disabled and "normal" bodies.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.47
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• pp.1-26
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• 2017

This paper focuses on three novels that reflect absence of family. Conflicts caused by absence of parents or lack of function and role of parents were principle drivers fueling growth novels. In Chinese growth novels, children in a long-standing tradition of emulsion and political pressure were unable to express their conflict with parents. Out of the collective interest and only until the late 1980s, which can be found of the individuals were able to fully appreciate the growth of children. Since the late 1990s, the creative individual cases to the growth is an important point of Chinese growth. Due to a close relationship of the literature and politics further noteworthy that the growth of state for personal growth for China's growth. Reform and opening up the end of the Cultural Revolution, the emergence of new generation of cultural sensitivity with a relatively free personal attention to the growth of the chance that can be. In this paper, created since the 1990s, the growth of the stories of yuhua (余華)'s "Cry in the Rain"("在細雨中呼喊"), sutong(蘇童)'s "The Northern Part of the City"("城北地帶"), wanggang(王剛)'s "English"("英格力士"), going to go through by focusing on how to respond in the lack of family. "Cry in the Rain" shows that a consciousness orphan child abandoned main actors 'consciousness from his birth parents and adoptive parents. "The Northern Part of the City" chronicles different growth stories of children who experienced a void because of their absent families and found comfort in peer groups. "English" is distinguished from the mainstream narrative of Chinese growth in terms of creating a role model. Individual growth through the role model in that it will eventually establish their own identities and further growth. Because of that, this novel is considered best practices of Chinese growth novels. This kind of narrative, which returns to the memory of the growth of growth, has a richer connotation amid various attempts by writers out of the past era of obsession and fatigue.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.