• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.1-29
• /
• 2018

Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup, published in 2001, well shows how the social issues have been changed in a way to reflect the South African society which is more complicated in the post-apartheid era. Examining the two different geographical territories between Johannesburg, South Africa and an unnamed nation in Middle East, putting aside the domestic racism between white and black, she extends her issue of racial other to global one with new rising issue of immigration in South African society. It seems that Gordimer's such issue is well represented by two main characters: Julie Summers who comes from a wealthy family and falls in love with Abdu, an illegal immigrant who was born from a poor country in Middle East and is now working at a garage in a downtown of Johannesburg with hiding his real name Ibrahim ibn Musa. Having an official relationship with Ibrahim and joining the regular meeting at the El-Ay (L.A.) Cafe where all participants can enjoy the freedom of expression/speech except for Abdu, she begins to have interest in his silence and his presence, orientalized as the Arab Prince for her imagination. Arriving at Abdu 's nation later, she also keeps projecting the 'less civilized' images to his nation where there are only desert, uneducated people, and dirty houses and streets. In doing so, Gordimer leads reader to a never-ending issue of Orientalism in the Western literature. Moreover, the writer attempts to create a female-centered community at the male-centered Islam community by marginalizing the presence of Abdu who finally leaves to America alone. As Julie is successfully acculturated to the unknown Abdu's community, she begins to place herself at the center of the community and plays a role as a mediator/communicator who can change/civilize it with her western knowledge of language and culture. By replacing the male-centered with the female-centered through Julie, Gordimer seems to be creating an idealized community with the notion of matriarchy. However, Gordimer places Abdu as an unstable subject who has to endlessly move back and forth for his undetermined national and cultural identity while Julie achieves the determined identity in both nations.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.58 no.2
• /
• pp.249-277
• /
• 2012

Eugene O'Neill's one-act play Before Breakfast (1916) depicts a morning scene of a married couple who live in a slovenly flat at Greenwich Village. There is no apparent dramatic action occurring in the play. Instead, the play is full of Mrs. Rowland's incessant complaints about her husband Alfred's loafing around bars with artists friends, neglecting his role as breadwinner. An irony is that every morning she prepares breakfast for the good-for-nothing husband even in the moment of complaining. It is worth noting that Alfred is an 'unseen character' who is never directly observed by the audience but is only described by her wife. Deprived of all chances to speak and present himself on stage, he is kept in the room throughout the play. In contrast, Mrs. Rowland dominates the stage, monopolizing language and action. The audience has to listen to her, judge from her statements, and take her one-sided complaints. The accused husband, with zero chance of showing up and defending himself, has no choice but to be the sinner as the wife intends. Another irony is that the audience's feeling about the situation is quite different from what is expected. The wife's complaints are regarded to be unfair and groundless in the reason that the situation is monopolized by her. In case of the husband, in contrast, the loss of voice and presence stresses the injustice of his dead-lock situation. In other words, the 'absent' quality of Alfred works to evoke the audience's sympathy for himself and subsequently makes his presence recognized, not visually but emotionally, by the audience throughout the play. Discovered in this paradoxical moment where the spectators understand or 'see' the status of the unseen and the devoiced message is successfully conveyed to the listeners, is the theatricality of absence. Adding to the function as theatrical device, the 'unseen character' Alfred works as a device of self-reflection to mirror the author's own life. Alfred, the alter-ego of O'Neill, effectively exorcises the author's life-long feeling of guilty as the unfaithful husband and father in the unhappy first marriage, successfully evoking the audience's sympathy for himself.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.23 no.1
• /
• pp.93-101
• /
• 2020

Korea, as a leader of Internet and game sector in IT industry, has been playing an important role in increasing its industrial development. This country has won the first place in wireless broadband usage and contributed to Internet game industry development. This means that Korean use smartphones most. It is juveniles that use Internet and smartphones most among Korean who use teenage., the number of the teenagers who overuse smartphones or Internet has surpassed 200,000. The number of the adolescents who spend more time using smartphone and Internet is about 180,000 and the number of the teens who are over-dependent to smartphone having trouble living their lives is over 22,000. The SNS usage rate of the contents that teens are most likely to use has accounted for over 80 percent. Among teens, SNS is being considered as a major means that builds relationship due to smartphone technology and the prevalence of smartphones. However, the use of SNS among youths has two sides; one is positive, the other negative. Not only does SNS have a positive function that it keeps relationship but it also has a negative function that it can lead to smartphone addiction.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.1-9
• /
• 2019

In an effort to explore the effects of Youtube video-watching activities on Korean college students' English reading comprehension skills, 148 undergraduate students who enrolled in a General English class at a university in Korea participated in the present study. Participants were randomly classified into four groups - three experimental groups and one control group - according to when they watch videos: before class (n = 33), during class (n = 42), after class (n = 36), and none (n = 37). Over 16 weeks, the three experimental groups engaged in Youtube video-watching activities for about 10 minutes before, during, and after the class, while the control group did not. Pre- and post-tests were administered to confirm the effects of the use of Youtube videos on improving English reading comprehension skills. To compare the improvement between groups, a one-way ANOVA was also run. Major findings are as follows: First, participants in all the three experimental groups significantly improved their English reading comprehension skills, indicating the beneficial effects of Youtube video-watching activities. However, there was no statistically significant difference in the mean improvement between the groups. Based on this, limitations and suggestions for the future research are discussed at the end.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
• /
• v.22 no.11
• /
• pp.324-330
• /
• 2022

The United Kingdom is known for the quality of its qualifications. There is a strict quality system with reputable bodies responsible for ensuring that high quality standards are met. In order for new qualifications to be accredited, they must meet all the requirements set out in the regulations for the quality and informatization of Education. The crucial role of the Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education (QAA) in the UK for creating high-quality management of higher education institutions is revealed, the influence of informatization tools on its effective mechanism as an independent entity is shown, and positive experience for the educational sector is highlighted. While the universities themselves are responsible for reviewing educational programs at the subject level, the QAA review focuses on verifying internal quality assurance, as well as systems and improvement strategies. The QAA uses a peer review process in which teams mostly consist of academic staff from other institutions to assess the quality of the institution's education. In Scotland, the team also includes an international reviewer. The student is also a member of the Scottish teams. In the UK, attention is paid to providing a cohort of experienced reviewers who can conduct high-quality monitoring and help with advice on improving education. All reviewers must complete training and have permission to participate in the review of educational programs. There are selected committees that are members of the QAA council, each of which is headed by a member of the Council or an independent person approved by the Council. Attention is drawn to the main areas of the QAA's work in the framework of environmental, social and corporate governance.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
• /
• 2001.01a
• /
• pp.292-297
• /
• 2001

In writing learning as a second/foreign language, a learner has to acquire not only lexical and syntactical knowledge but also the skills to choose suitable words for content which s/he is interested in. A learning system should extrapolate learner\\`s intention and give example phrases that concern with the content in order to support this on the system. However, a learner cannot always represent a content of his/her desired phrase as inputs to the system. Therefore, the system should be equipped with a diagnosis function for learner\\`s intention. Additionally, a system also should be equipped with an analysis function to score similarity between learner\\`s intention and phrases which is stored in the system on both syntactic and idiomatic level in order to present appropriate example phrases to a learner. In this paper, we propose architecture of an interactive support method for English writing learning which is based an analogical search technique of sample phrases from corpora. Our system can show a candidate of variation/next phrases to write and an analogous sentence that a learner wants to represents from corpora.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.22 no.2
• /
• pp.358-369
• /
• 2022

The purpose of this study is to verify the anthropomorphic design factors of pedagogical agents that can enhance user experience in learning foreign languages (English) through smartphones. In this study, when designing a pedagogical agent that delivers content, the presence or absence of the agent's image, the degree of human nature (HN), and role setting (leader vs. companion) among the anthropomorphic factors that influence facilitating learning, credibility, and engagement perception. As a result of the experiment, HN alone did not show a facilitating learning effect, and images and roles improved not only the facilitating learning effect but also other user experience factors. When HN factors were designed in combination with image and role factors, they were effective in overall user experience effects such as facilitating learning, credibility, and engagement.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.12 no.6
• /
• pp.2748-2760
• /
• 2018

This paper proposes an audio event classification method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNN has great advantages of distinguishing complex shapes of image. Proposed system uses the features of audio sound as an input image of CNN. Mel scale filter bank features are extracted from each frame, then the features are concatenated over 40 consecutive frames and as a result, the concatenated frames are regarded as an input image. The output layer of CNN generates probabilities of audio event (e.g. dogs bark, siren, forest). The event probabilities for all images in an audio segment are accumulated, then the audio event having the highest accumulated probability is determined to be the classification result. This proposed method classified thirty audio events with the accuracy of 81.5% for the UrbanSound8K, BBC Sound FX, DCASE2016, and FREESOUND dataset.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.1-25
• /
• 2011

Brand names are often considered as a part of product and important extrinsic cues of product evaluation, when consumers make purchasing decisions. For a company, brand names are also important assets. Building a strong brand name in the Chinese commonwealth is a main challenge for many global companies. One of the first problem global company has to face is how to translate English brand name into Chinese brand name. It is very difficult decision because of cultural and linguistic differences. Western languages are based on an alphabet phonetic system, whereas Chinese are based on ideogram. Chinese speakers are more likely to recall stimuli presented as brand names in visual rather than spoken recall, whereas English speakers are more likely to recall the names in spoken rather than in visual recall. We interpret these findings in terms of the fact that mental representations of verbal information in Chinese are coded primarily in a visual manner, whereas verbal information in English is coded by primarily in a phonological manner. A key linguistic differences that would affect the decision to standardize or localize when transferring English brand name to Chinese brand name is the writing system. Prior Chinese brand naming research suggests that popular Chinese naming translations foreign companies adopt are phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic translation. The phonetic translation refers to the speech sound that is produced, such as the pronunciation of the brand name. The semantic translation involves the actual meaning of and association made with the brand name. The phonosemantic translation preserves the sound of the brand name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner. name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.197-205
• /
• 2020

Korean language has the characteristics that the pronunciation of phoneme units such as vowels and consonants are fixed and the pronunciation associated with a notation does not change, so that foreign learners can approach rather easily Korean language. However, when one pronounces words, phrases, or sentences, the pronunciation changes in a manner of a wide variation and complexity at the boundaries of syllables, and the association of notation and pronunciation does not hold any more. Consequently, it is very difficult for foreign learners to study Korean standard pronunciations. Despite these difficulties, it is believed that systematic analysis of pronunciation errors for Korean words is possible according to the advantageous observations that the relationship between Korean notations and pronunciations can be described as a set of firm rules without exceptions unlike other languages including English. In this paper, we propose a visualization framework which shows the differences between standard pronunciations and erratic ones as quantitative measures on the computer screen. Previous researches only show color representation and 3D graphics of speech properties, or an animated view of changing shapes of lips and mouth cavity. Moreover, the features used in the analysis are only point data such as the average of a speech range. In this study, we propose a method which can directly use the time-series data instead of using summary or distorted data. This was realized by using the deep learning-based technique which combines Self-organizing map, variational autoencoder model, and Markov model, and we achieved a superior performance enhancement compared to the method using the point-based data.