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This paper studies the relation between canonical/variegated babble (CB/VB) and early speech in an infant acquiring Mandarin Chinese from 9 to 17 months. The infant was audio-and video-taped in her home almost every week. The data analyzed here come from 1,621 utterances extracted from 23 sessions ranging from 30 minutes to one hour, from age 00:09;07 to 01:05;27. The data was digitized, and segments from 23 sessions were transcribed in narrow IPA and coded for analysis. Babble was coded from age 00:09;07 to 01:00;00, and words were coded from 01:00;00 to 01:05;27, proto-words appeared at 11 months, and some babble was still present after 01:10;00. 3821 segments were counted in CB/VB utterances, plus the segments found in 899 word tokens. The data transcription was completed and checked by the author and was rechecked by two other researchers who majored in Chinese phonetics in order to ensure the reliability, we reached an agreement of 95.65%. Mandarin Chinese is phonetically very rich in consonants, especially affricates: it has aspirated and unaspirated stops in labial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation; affricates and fricatives in alveolar, retroflex, and palatal places; /f/; labial, alveolar, and velar nasals; a lateral;[h]; and labiovelar and palatal glides. In the child’s pre-speech phonetic repertoire, 7 different consonants and 10 vowels were transcribed at 00:09;07. By 00:10;16, the number of phones was more than doubled (17 consonants, 25 vowels), but the rate of increase slowed after 11 months of age. The phones from babbling remained active throughout the child’s early and subsequent speech. The rank order of the occurrence of the major class types for both CB and early speech was: stops, approximants, nasals, affricates, fricatives and lateral. As expected, unaspirated stops outnumbered aspirated stops, and front stops and nasals were more frequent than back sounds in both types of utterances. The fact that affricates outnumbered fricatives in the child’s late babble indicates the pre-speech influence of the ambient language. The analysis of the data also showed that: 1) the phonetic characteristics of CB/VB and early meaningful speech are extremely similar. The similarities of CB/VB and speech prove that the two are deeply related; 2) The infant has demonstrated similar preferences for certain types of sounds in the two stages; 3) The infant’s babbling was patterned at segmental level, and this regularity was similarly evident in the early speech of children. The three types being coronal plus front vowel; labial plus central and dorsal plus back vowel exhibited much overlap in the phonetic forms of CB/ VB and early speech. So the child’s CB/ VB at this stage already shared the basic architecture, composition and representation of early speech. The evidence of similarity between CB/VB and early speech leaves no doubt that phones present in CB/VB are indeed precursors to early speech.

This paper is a qualitative study of the experiences of Korean heritage language learners (KHLLs) with literacy (reading and writing), particularly before they enter the college-level heritage language classroom. Previous research, both qualitative and quantitative, has addressed the overall language background of KHLLs, including oral and aural proficiency and writing and reading ability, as well as demographic information (such as when the student immigrated to the United States) in relation to language test scores. This study addresses KHLL experiences in the following six areas as they relate to student perceptions and attitudes toward their own heritage language literacy: language proficiency, motivation for learning, academic preparedness, cultural connectedness, emotional factors, and social factors. Fourteen undergraduate students at a university in the western United States participated in a convenience sample by responding to a 10-question survey. Trends in responses indicated that KHLLs entered the classroom with high integrational motivation and experienced great satisfaction with perceived progress in literacy, but students also expressed regret for having missed childhood learning experiences that would likely have resulted in higher proficiency. These experiences include informal and formal instruction in the home and formal instruction outside of the home.

This paper examined the role of intermediate texts in the writing process in the context of an EFL composition class. From the tradition of teacher research, this study examined how the Korean college students in different proficiency groups created intermediate texts and used them while composing their own writing. The students produced various types of intermediate texts during the compositing process, which could serve as a basis of their writing. However, the patterns of using these intermediate texts differed widely across the proficiency groups. A writing cycle for the low proficiency group, or “surface reading-few intermediate texts-writing,” indicates that less proficient students tended to engage in reading in separation of writing practices and thus produced few intermediate texts through their literacy practices. On the other hand, the students in the higher proficiency groups revealed the more integrated pattern (i.e., purpose reading/intermediate texts/writing), indicating that they often engaged in reading with specific writing purposes, practiced reading in connection to other writing practices, and elaborated written intermediate texts produced. This study argues that, to shift our student writers to a higher level category, we as teachers need to help them engage in reading and writing practices in the way they produce and use intermediate texts appropriate to their specific writing purposes.

This paper examines the American role in shaping South Korean nation-building during the early Cold War by considering how the United States attempted to form South Korea’s education and how Koreans responded to these efforts. It looks at education as an arena where “American” ideas such as democracy and liberalism were received, transformed, and utilized by Koreans. This study pays particular attention to the gap between American intentions and Korean expectations, as well as to the competition between American and Japanese systems, which explains the contradictory role America played in South Korean nation-building. In order to better assess the role of the United States in shaping South Korean education, this article considers the complex dynamics between the Japanese legacies, American influence, and Korean actors. Americans had exerted a great effect on Korean education since the beginning of their relationship. American missionaries, U.S. military government, and educational mission teams had all contributed to the expansion of educational opportunities for Koreans. Through the educational institutions that they established or helped establish, Americans tried to spread “their” ideas. In this process, Americans had to struggle with two obstacles: Korean nationalism and the legacies of Japanese colonialism. Many Koreans used American missionary schools for their own purposes and resisted U.S. military government’s policies which ignored their desire for self-determination. American education missions had limited effect on Korean education due to the heterogeneous Japanese system that was still influencing South Korea even after liberation. The ways in which Americans have influenced the democratization of South Korea have not been simple. Although “American” democratic ideas reached Koreans through various routes, Koreans understood the “American” idea within their own historical context and in a way that fit their existing socio-political relations. Oftentimes suspicious of “American” democracy, Koreans developed their own concept of democracy. The overall American influence on Korean democratization, as well as on Korean education, was important but limited. While Americans helped Koreans build educational infrastructure and tried to transfer democratic ideas through it, Koreans actors and Japanese colonial legacies limited its impact.

This paper reports on an ongoing study that utilizes the literacy autobiographies of 10 Asian and 10 Western graduate students from TESOL Masters programs in Korea and America as data for a cross cultural study on the discursive process of identity formation and the development of critical consciousness (Freire, 2000). While the data suggests similarities and differences between cultures in terms of the effects of education, social relationships, media, and religion, no definitive claims may be made due to the small size of the research corpus. However, analysis of the data revealed that only four of the narratives could be judged as engaging in critical introspection of individual subjects systems of knowledge, values, and beliefs, as opposed to the other narratives that were primarily descriptive of individual personal experiences. As such, this study found that while the willingness and ability to engage in the critical practices which lead to the development of a critical consciousness are similar across cultures, they may be mediated by the literacy practices inscribed in education, media, and other social practices.

Based on case studies from Japan and South Korea, this review paper explores the hidden costs of English language learning (ELL). In a context where English has become a commodity and ELL a form of consumption, we focus on the personal and social costs of (a) studying abroad as a much-touted path to “native-like” proficiency and (b) sexualization of language teaching materials in order to reach new niche markets. The hidden costs of ELL are embedded in language ideologies which set English up as a magical means of self-transformation and, at the same time, an unattainable goal for most Japanese and Koreans. We end with the call to expose debilitating language ideologies in order to shed light on the hidden costs of ELL.

Tolerance education must be based on the fact that tolerance like democracy cannot be achieved once and for all. Students must learn to constantly watch political and cultural processes for negative developments. Tolerance for others‘ values and behaviour can be learnt by studying previous historiographical views. The basic attitude to be learnt is repect for other cultures - within one’s own culture as well as foreign cultures.

In David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Shirley Lim’s Joss and Gold, two Asian-American texts exploring the relationship between America and Asia, the classic Orientalist motif of the infinitely submissive oriental female is reworked to articulate an Asian response to American hegemony. Both works mobilize the Asian female as a figure of contestation to destabilize and reconceptualize the patriarchal and Orientalist strategies of Western cultural and political domination. This paper explores the tactically different though strategically similar counter-discursive moves adopted in the two works to suggest a broader cultural realignment in Asian-American relations.

Soon after joining the Canadian Confederation in 1867, the province of Quebec adopted the phrase Je me souviens (“As I recall”) as its ‘national’ motto, although many Québécois do not remember today what they were supposed to memorize, as collective subject, when their government voted this motion. My thesis is that contrary to other countries which have a strong sense of history based on a secular tradition, this process was more complicated in Quebec — as if a collective memory loss lied at the heart of it’s history. Through a rereading of Hubert Aquin’s cult novel, Trou de mémoire (in its English translation Blackout), first published in 1968, I try to illustrate this paradox and to emphasize the heuristic functions of memory blanks, gaps and lapses in certain postmodern narratives, after the historical breakdown of “the great narratives” (Lyotard). In this perspective, the example of Quebec, through the voice of one of its more gifted yet controversial novelist, can be seen as emblematic of what happens when the mnemonic impossibility of rewriting history opens up new possibilities for writing fiction.

Due to the remarkable changes in the early twentieth century, the new invention and technology impacted peoples’ everyday lives and people started to use the word, modern, to apply specifically to what pertained to present times and to designate a movement in what was new and not old-fashioned—a condition of newness. In the present day, however, the fantastic cultural changes of a century ago have now become commonplace, and what was once considered radically new is no longer a reason to marvel. This paper considers what it mean to be modern, once the new is no longer new. This question seems to remain as complicated and inappropriate to ponder because the consideration and impact of modernity cannot simply end with the end of an era. This paper investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity and postmodernity. In doing so, first of all, this paper pays attentions to the notion of modernity and popular culture which emerged together in the early twentieth century when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, it examines how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in a postmodern era. That is, popular culture is identified as a large amount of intertextuality or collective experiences due to its intermingling of complementary distribution sources and techonology. Thus, this paper explores that popular culture devotes itself other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity. In order to find a critical juncture of the complex networks of modernity and popular culture, this paper considers two places, Chicago and Gyeongsung in the 1920s and 1930s in which the rapid modern experience took place and the modern movement forced the two societies to join the mass consumer culture whether willingly or not. Next, this paper considers two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Both films have common themes of the 1920s and 30s such as violence, adultery, femme fatal, and criminal themes with the forms of musical, dance, drama, and romance. Through the textual analysis of both Chicago and Modern Boy, two films are compared in observing the similar and different ways in which two films deal with the theme of modernity when they are represented from the contemporary perspectives. More specifically, this paper questions how modernity is present in contemporary cultural forms such as commercial and hybrid genre films; and how these movies create a new image of modern by embodying the double coding. Ultimately, this paper aims at realizing the paradox of double edged modernity and its ongoing discourse that controls people’s consciousness through the medium of popular culture.

This article examines Bong Joon-ho’s science fiction/horror film, The Host (2006) and interrogates its depiction of a contemporary South Korean family in crisis. The writer considers the film as a resonant cultural artefact and a manifestation of particularly new-millennial anxieties concerned with the continued involvement of the United States in South Korean affairs, fears of an erosion of traditional family values and mistrust of officious, state endorsed bureaucracy. The Host emerges as a profoundly visceral depiction of an ordinary family set against everyone with no one to turn to except each other.

The trend of globalization has sharpened the debate on interculturality, which scholars examine from different and often conflicting points of view (‘content’ vs. ‘practice’, ‘culture-specific’ vs. ‘universal’, ‘communication (meta)theory’ vs. ‘communication practice’, ‘individual’ vs. ‘collective’, etc.). Whereas all these approaches are necessary to describe the multiple dimensions of interculturality, their dichotomous nature does not help to account for its internal complexity, which cannot be dissociated from the connections that exist among all these dimensions. The difficulty posed by the essentialist interpretations that tend to result from these dichotomies is compounded by the fact that in postmodern debates priority has been given to approaches that emphasize individual or collective agency over structural constraints which have to do with political economy or with cultural and linguistic codes and traditions. This paper aims mainly at suggesting that the dissolution of the boundaries that exist between these approaches should be pursued in order to get a fuller and richer approach to their common object of study. After discussing, by way of illustration, content-based and practice-based perspectives, we suggest that one way of getting beyond these dichotomies consists in focusing on the ‘interactional’ dimension of interculturality, which means laying emphasis on intersubjectivity and, particularly, on the individual subjects considered as members of different cultural communities who strive to transcend their sociocultural boundaries in order to reach harmonious interactions in a world in which inequality and the de-territorialization of people and cultures are central features.

This study reviews critical literatures regarding Asian cinema, focusing on studies of Japanese cinema, to show that Western scholarship on non-Western national cinemas have been divided into two approaches: traditionalism and modernism. It argues that such a division is not merely a critical tendency but indicative of the fact that a national cinema is an internally divided construct. To support the point, this study examines Chinese film studies conducted by Chinese film critics and the history of South Korean cinema during the 1970s and 80s. Then, it proposes the hegemony model to theorize the inner structure of national cinema. It finally suggests the possibility of comparative film study that the national cinema thesis may activate.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the road in American culture has been identified with independence, mobility, and speed, but in his seminal poem, “Song of the Open Road,” Walt Whitman characterized road journeys as simultaneously physical, intellectual, and spiritual, a view embraced by Vincent Van Gogh whose Terrace of a Café at Night illustrates in paint what Whitman said in words. Others such as Jack Kerouac in On the Road followed in Whitman’s tradition, one taken up even more recently by David Lynch, whose films are best known for a condemnation of American suburban life, but whose Straight Story evokes a profound spirituality as part of the road. This essay explores spirituality in these various texts.