• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제15권3호
• /
• pp.129-150
• /
• 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.

• 영어어문교육
• /
• 제11권4호
• /
• pp.305-333
• /
• 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.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제54권2호
• /
• pp.189-215
• /
• 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.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제56권3호
• /
• pp.501-517
• /
• 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.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제56권1호
• /
• pp.79-101
• /
• 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.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제56권4호
• /
• pp.597-618
• /
• 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.

• 비교문화연구
• /
• 제47권
• /
• pp.1-26
• /
• 2017

본 논문은 1990년대 이후 발표된 여화(余華)의 "재세우중호함(在細雨中呼喊)"(1993), 소동(蘇童)의 "성북지대(城北地帶)"(1994), 왕강(王剛)의 "영격역사(英格力士)"(2004)에 나타난 가족결핍과 그 서사적 대응방식을 살펴보는 것을 목적으로 삼는다. 소설에 공통적으로 등장하는 소재인 결핍된 가족은 존재의 부재를 뜻하기도 하지만 그 기능과 역할의 부재를 의미하기도 한다. 결핍을 야기하는 원인은 작품마다 서로 다르며 대응 양상 또한 차이를 보인다. 중국의 성장 서사는 오랜 시간 동안 전통의 유제와 여러 가지 정치적 압박 속에서 성장과정에서 일어나는 부모와의 갈등, 성장자 자신의 내면의 고통들을 집단의 경험 속에 매몰시켰다. 성장의 기억을 개인에게 돌려주기 시작했던 1980년대의 선취에 힘입어 1990년대 성장 서사는 지나간 연대의 강박과 피로에서 벗어난 작가들의 다양한 시도 속에서 더욱 풍부한 함의를 지니고 있다. "가랑비 속의 외침"은 친부모와 양부모에게 의도치 않은 '버려짐'을 당한 주인공의 심리적 고아의식을 보여주었고, "성북지대"는 부재된 가족에게 염증을 느끼고 또래 집단 속에서 위안을 받는 아이들의 서로 다른 성장의 이야기를 들려준다. "오, 나의 잉글리쉬 보이"는 동일시의 대상을 등장시킨다는 점에서 중국 성장소설의 주류적 서사와 구분된다. 개인의 성장은 그를 통해 진일보하고 결국 성장자 자신의 정체성을 확립하게 된다는 점에서 이 소설은 성장소설의 모범사례로 여겨진다.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제58권5호
• /
• pp.809-837
• /
• 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.