KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study examines the major impact of global discourse of English as an international language (EIL) on English language teaching (ELT) in Korea with primary focus given to education policies and pedagogical practices operating within the nation’s English language teaching. The study first reviewed the major changes in English education policies since the 1990s in which English was officially recognized as an international language in the government’s rhetoric (following segyehwa policy) and began to spread its social presence within the nation as a guiding theme for educational upheaval. The study also examined higher institutions' practices on ELT and students' perspectives on English learning as a review of the potential representations of these political changes. The study shows that global discourses of EIL impose considerable influence on Korean English education. The political ideals and motivations for revamping the frame of ELT paved the base for the National Education Curricula(the 6th Revision), in which communicative competence was proclaimed first time in the nation’s history as the primary goal for English language teaching. The promotion of functional syllabi as a step to develop communicative competence seems to be a firmly established objective for ELT pedagogy at all school levels; yet the analysis of students' perspectives reveals that such national objectives leave a significant gap in our understanding of the reality of English classrooms, in which test-oriented pedagogy prevails over communicative competence as the primary ELT objective. Needs-based ELT syllabi and clear standards for student achievement are discussed.

This article focuses on examining how the American novelist Henry Miller takes ‘bridge’ as a threshold from which to explore the multiplicity of the metropolis New York through his 1936 work Black Spring. Instead of treating bridge as a passage or backdrop for his narrative construction, Miller activates it as a territory where his past memories and present experiences, as well as disparate and fleeting impressions and imaginations, meet altogether, which release a plethora of urban affects in aleatory and haptic ways. In this respect the Brooklyn Bridge is the very place that repeatedly appears in Black Spring, which plays as a critical point of departure enabling Miller to set up a world in which he weaves together instances of everyday life without subsuming one over another. Although subtle and implicit, Miller brings forth a way of taking the capitalist city space as an affective terrain in a Deleuzian sense, which encourages us to be attentive to the vibrancy and dynamism immanent in the modern metropolis despite its alienating nature.

A growing body of research was conducted after Higgins (1997) proposed Regulatory Focus Theory which consists of a promotion focus and a prevention focus. Both of them have been reported to influence behaviors, but it is unclear how they would be related. The present study, thus, investigated how personality traits are related to the regulatory foci. The Korean Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (K-RFQ) and the Korean version of the HEXACO were used to measure the self-regulatory foci and personality traits, respectively. The results showed that promotion focus was significantly associated with eXtraversion and Conscientiousness and that prevention focus was significantly associated with Openness to experience. These results are expected to provide a basic framework of the personality traits and the self-regulatory focus.

This qualitative research study aims to confirm human rights issues regarding female North Korean defectors living in China. The method of qualitative research for this study was to apply the thematic analysis method of Patton (2002). The research subjects were eight female North Korean defectors currently living in South Korea who lived in China for more than three years. The results of the topical analysis from those in-depth interviews are as follows: The human rights situations of female North Korean defectors living in China can be broadly divided into “Loss of Human Dignity” and “Threat in Daily Life.” “Loss of Human Dignity” can be sub-classified into “Human Trafficking,” “Crisis in Life” and “Abuse and Exploitation.” “Threat in Daily Life” can also be sub-classified into the sub-topics “Not Being Provided with Shelter,” “Not Being Guaranteed the Right to Health” and “Discrimination and Isolation.” It has been confirmed through this qualitative research that those female North Korean defectors living in China have experienced serious human rights violations, but domestic and international efforts regarding this issue are insufficient. Based on these results, it was concluded that there is a need to further raise the human rights issues of female North Korean defectors living in China.

A brief review has been conducted about the important stages of child reading acquisition. In this review, we explained supporting evidences that automatic reading ability, the ability to match letters to phonemes implicitly, is the key cognitive ability that the child needs in order to acquire reading ability. We also explained phonemic awareness and parent reading are two necessary variables for acquiring the automatic reading ability. The relationship between the presence of phonological recoding in adult word recognition and the phonemic awareness in childhood was also discussed. Finally, the implication of the such idea on Korean reading acquisition and English learning as a second language were mentioned.