Workshop overview

In late 2021, the English departments of Iowa State University (ISU) and Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) signed a memorandum of understanding to facilitate student exchanges and to sponsor collaborative events. Our two-day workshop in February 2023 will be the first such event. Funded by BK (Brain Korea) 21, the workshop will be conducted on Zoom and will be open to all students and faculty of the participating universities. The workshop’s principal purpose is to introduce graduate and undergraduate students to the kinds of research faculty members from both departments are currently pursuing. If this event proves to be mutually beneficial, we hope to hold similar workshops in the future.

The first day of the workshop is devoted to literary and cultural research. Prof. Matthew Sivils will bring the insights of ecoGothic criticism and cultural monster theory to bear on U.S. author Charles W. Chesnutt’s conjure tales. Jihay Park will take a games studies approach to understanding the Los Angeles studio Tender Claws’s multiplayer online game The Under Presents: Tempest. Prof. Ji Eun Lee will conclude the day’s presentations by discussing how Bram Stoker’s Dracula features narratives that prowl like urban stray dogs and anticipates the co-evolution of human and animal intelligence in the multi-species city.

The second day is devoted to linguistic and pedagogical research. Prof. Bethany Gray will compare the grammatical complexity of university-level writing produced by first-language and second-language students. Prof. Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer and Prof. John Levis will examine the teachability of intonation. Febriana Lestari will share her analysis of verb-argument constructions in a corpus of Indonesian second language learners. Last but not least, Ziying Li will explain how two different uses of the Chinese weishenme show divergent sensitivity to island effects.

Workshop program

Day 1: Thursday, February 23 (Korean time) / Wednesday, February 22 (Iowa time)

Meeting room ID: 823 1928 2577 / Password: 12345

Link: https://skku-edu.zoom.us/j/82319282577?pwd=cllqbW9YZlFzZkVxNnNvMUZ3MllqQT09

Moderator: Shawn Normandin (SKKU)

Day2: Friday, February 24 (Korean time) / Thursday, February 23 (Iowa time)

Meeting room ID: 818 3421 9168 / Password: 12345

Link: https://skku-edu.zoom.us/j/81834219168?pwd=Z0J1NzY5MWEwMkIwZFJLc2xwQVRSUT09

Moderator: Nayoun Kim (SKKU)

Abstracts of presentations

Day 1

Presentation 1: Matthew Sivils (ISU)

Title: EcoGothic Monstrosity in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales

In this paper I analyze Charles W. Chesnutt’s conjure tales, particularly his 1887 short story, “The Goophered Grapevine” in light of ecoGothic literary criticism and cultural monster theory. After providing a brief overview of how I apply the ecoGothic in general, I look specifically at how Chesnutt’s fiction imagines the plantation as both the product and embodiment of a monstrous system of agriculturally-based racial oppression. Chesnutt counters the romantic portrayals of the southern plantation so common to stories of the late nineteenth-century period. In so doing, he points out that the plantation system lives on in the post-bellum era, highlighting the idea that the combined racial and environmental abuse of the plantation derives from a cruel and short-sighted agricultural stewardship, one from which both southern and northern interests have much to gain.

Presentation 2: Jihay Park (SKKU)

Title: A Game Studies Approach to Interactivity and Immersion in The Under Presents: Tempest

This paper separates immersive theatre from immersive experience, and explores the relation between audience interactivity and immersion in The Under Presents: Tempest (2020) by Tender Claws. Tempest is a multiplayer online game, and the relation between audience participation and immersion requires a game studies approach that distinguishes puzzle immersion from narrative immersion for such approach denies one specific kind of interactivity that guarantees the sense of intense involvement in all contexts, acknowledges the importance of the meaning of interactivity over its physical manifestation, and argues for an immersive experience that exists as a series of graded states. This paper applies the multivalent model of interactivity and examines cognitive interactivity, functional interactivity, explicit interactivity, and beyond-the-object interactivity in Tempest based on the author’s experience of the theatre. The paper concludes that immersion in Tempest derives from various modes of interactivity, and is experienced not as a felt/not felt binary but as a graded state consisting of states of engagement, engrossment, and total immersion. Tempest thus demonstrates how immersive experience can be constructed by gameplay (interactivity) as well as mise-en-scéne or design.

Presentation 3: Ji Eun Lee (SKKU)

Title: Prowling in London: Canines in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Dracula first appears in front of the British public in England not as a gentleman but in the form of “an immense dog.” I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the context of human-animal encounters happening on the streets of London when the fear of rabid dogs swept the city. Victorian urban projects aimed at building an urban structure securing human control over animals. Yet this vision was disrupted by the ubiquitous presence of stray dogs in London and their alleged infection with rabies. Dracula’s and Un-Dead Lucy’s prowling in London emblematizes this threat of urban stray dogs. The novel’s narratives also prowl, emulating animal intelligence in the way they rely on instant perception lacking reflection and leading to a hunt. This temporal immediacy and chasing mobility of prowling narratives envision co-evolutionary intelligence, dissolving the human-animal binary which structured the domestication, or the anthropocentric urbanization, of the city

Day 2

Presentation 1: Bethany Gray (ISU)

Title: Developmental Trajectories in University Writing: L1 and L2 Writers and the Development of Grammatical Complexity

As students progress through the years of university, both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) writers are faced with a shift away from writing for general composition courses and toward writing within particular disciplinary communities, all while they continue to develop their academic writing abilities. Substantial research (e.g., Staples et al. 2016; Parkinson & Musgrave 2014; Lan & Sun 2019) has focused on the development of grammatical complexity as a key indicator of writing ability (Ortega 2003; Bulté & Housen 2014). However, this research has typically focused on either L1 or L2 writers, or has compared L1 and L2 writers at a single point in time, leading to an incomplete understanding of the extent to which L1 and L2 writers follow similar or different developmental trajectories—despite widespread acknowledgement that L1 and L2 writers arrive at the university with diverse educational backgrounds, experiences with academic writing, and writing abilities.

Taking a Register-Functional (RF) approach to complexity (Biber et al. 2022), the goal of this presentation is to directly compare L1 and L2 writers across the years of university to contribute to our understanding of how L1 and L2 writers develop over time in distinctive ways. Using the methodologies of corpus linguistics and drawing on two recent studies (Staples, Gray, Biber, & Egbert 2022; Gray, Staples, & Bordbarjavidi 2022), the presentation describes the use of grammatical complexity features in a sample of 1,869 texts (4.3 million words) from the BAWE corpus (Nesi et al. 2004-2007). After annotating the corpus using the developmental complexity tagger (Gray, Geluso & Nguyen 2019), the use of 26 clausal and phrasal complexity features from the RF framework are compared across L1 and L2 writers, 4 years of study, and 3 disciplines (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Life/Physical Sciences). The developmental paths that novice writers follow are characterized using a novel method for describing developmental trajectories (by considering changes in the frequency of occurrence, the shape of the frequency changes, and whether L1 and L2 writers converge over time). In addition, the analysis goes beyond frequency, exploring how frequency-based shifts in L1 and L2 writing also reflect development in terms of the range, diversity, and functional/semantic characteristics of complexity features. Findings indicate key similarities and differences across L1 and L2 writers, including that both groups shift toward the more frequent use of phrasal complexity and a less frequent use of clausal complexity over time, but that L2 writers rely on phrasal complexity features to a greater extent at earlier years of study.

Presentation 2: Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer (ISU) and John Levis (ISU)

Title: Learning the Forms and Functions of Intonation through Explicit Teaching and Perceptual Training

Intonation is a prosodic feature many teachers skip teaching believing that it cannot be taught (Atoye, 2005; Jenkins, 2000), or that learners produce intonation patterns successfully without understanding their pragmatic functions (Reed & Michaud, 2015). In this study, we investigate the influence of explicit teaching and perceptual training on the perception and production of three intonation forms (fall, rise, fall-rise) and three meanings (finality, nonfinality, and implicating uncertainty).

This study used a quasi-experimental design including a pre-test, three-week teaching intervention, and post-test. Participants were 31 EFL learners taking a listening and pronunciation course. In the pre-test, learners first completed two read-aloud tasks: reading statements to reflect finality, non-finality or uncertainty. Learners then completed five perception tasks. In task 1, they worked on a discrimination task and stated if the two short phrases they heard had the same or different intonation pattern. In tasks 2-4, they listened to various statements and identified the intonation pattern of the statement: fall, rise, or fall-rise. In task 5, learners chose the most likely meaning of the sentence in a 3-item multiple choice test. Students received explicit intonation training in class eight weeks after the pre-test. The training lasted three weeks and students had online perceptual tests each week with a different set of statements for both pre-test task types. Following the training, learners took a post-test with the same design.

According to the results of a series of dependent t-tests, learners improved both perception and production of intonation significantly. However, the level of their improvement differs depending on the tasks. Findings of the study suggest that learning the fall-rise intonation (non-finality, uncertainty) might be more challenging to learn compared to the fall and rise intonation patterns.

Presentation 3: Febriana Lestari (ISU student)

Title: An Investigation of VACs Knowledge Development in Indonesian L2 Learners of English: A Corpus-based Study of Construction Grammar

Language is made up of thousands of constructions that vary in size and levels of complexity (Goldberg, 2003; Ellis et al., 2016). Out of the many existing constructions, Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs), a verb followed by a preposition and a noun or a noun phrase, as in “He was grumbling about the weather”, are good predictors of a meaning conveyed in a sentence, and thus could inform about learners’ interlanguage development. The present study investigated 19 VACs across proficiency levels, employing a corpus-based study for an SLA research purpose. This study used the Education First Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT) corpus of the L1 Indonesian subset from beginner to advanced levels (CEFR A1 to C1; Council of Europe, 2001). Type and token frequencies of VACs were counted to look at the VACs distributions. Constructional Growth analysis was then conducted to identify the distinct verbs that lead the VACs development followed by correlational analyses to indicate verb-VACs association across proficiency levels. The results show that learners’ constructional knowledge is indicated by the increase in types and token frequency, and their language repertoire expands as their proficiency level increases.

※ 참가자 여러분께서는 비상시에 아래 공유드리는 백업용 ZOOM 회의룸에 접속해주시기 바랍니다.

(Participants should access the backup ZOOM conference room shared below in case of emergency.)

[The Backup ZOOM Meeting-room]

◎ DAY1.

▣ ID : 833 9273 6981

▣ PW : 12345

▣ Link : https://skku-edu.zoom.us/j/83392736981?pwd=RkF1T09ZcXBiRldxL2dKSzEyRUNRUT09

◎ DAY2.

▣ ID : 811 2797 0918

▣ PW : 12345

▣ Link : https://skku-edu.zoom.us/j/81127970918?pwd=dTJDL054V1N5bkJicGJ2QXhUenpVdz09