Month: April 2017
Foreign Language Anxiety: A Case of Thai EFL Learners at Ubon Ratchathani University
Despite the decades-long integration of EFL in the Thai education system, Thai EFL students in general still perceive the English language as very difficult to be learned and thus, respond negatively to acquiring the language. With their Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) they carry to their EFL classes certain notions rooted in past and current experiences, …
Education for urban refugee children in Malaysia: Pathway to Peace
This research focuses on the educational experiences of urban refugee children in Malaysia, examining the expectations of parents, NGO of educational projects for urban refugee children in Malaysia and investigating if the education space contributes to peace through intergroup contact. The conceptual framework for the study is based on intergroup contact theory which is based …
Ethical Leadership Competencies for Revitalizing Moral Learning in Higher Education
Moral and ethics courses are widely provided in higher education institutions; yet, they are taught by ineffective teaching methods. So, this paper is mainly to explore ideal practices of ethical leaders for revitalizing moral learning in higher education. The research method was based on a qualitative approach. The researcher reviewed books and articles on education …
The Concept of Measurement in Pre-Service Teachers
This paper presents the results of phase 1 of the research project “pre-service mathematics teachers’ mathematical conception in the context of lesson study and problem solving approach”. The objective of this research was to explore mathematical concepts of pre-service mathematics teachers for fourth grader prior teaching in schools. The participants to the research included 121 …
Exploratory Practice: A Case Study of Communication Arts Students at UBU
English in Communication Arts is a compulsory course at Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand. The main purpose of this course is to promote English language of communication arts students enrolling in the course. By adopting Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Lenzuen, 1997) as a theoretical framework for investigation, this empirical study aims to explore how Exploratory Practice …
Speaking Difficulties Encountered by Low-Proficiency EFL Students at Ubon Ratchathani University
In English as a foreign language learning contexts, speaking, as one of the productive skills, has been considered as a challenging skill to master due to the number of errors and mistakes it is mostly associated with. The purpose of this study is to find out the speaking difficulties encountered by five low-proficiency students of …
The Development of Anti-Corruption Education Model to Support Students Integrity Character in Schools Through Civic Education
Civic Education is a subject that aims to humanize the students to become good citizens in accordance with the objectives and state ideals. Civic education subject in schooling has taught both the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning in the application of the expected characters. Unfortunately, this formula has not shown significant results because of the …
The Role of L1 in the Instruction of L2: Perspectives of Thai EFL Teachers
The medium of instruction has long been a contentious issue in foreign language teaching. The teacher’s decision about which language should be used to deliver the lesson and interact with the students in the classroom—whether it be the language or languages of the students and teachers or the target language—is not always dependent on existing …
Using the Concept of Fashion to Link Diverse Programs
Departments housed in US land grant agricultural colleges often have the unenviable and difficult task of justifying their existence as collaborative entities that complement each other. Programs like fashion design and merchandising, family resources, and agricultural sciences have historic roots with seemingly little relevance to each other in today’s academic milieu. Putting politics aside, educators …
Developing an Instrument for Self-Evaluation of Teaching and Learning Competencies: A Review of Faculty Professional Development and the Changing Higher Education Landscape in Singapore
The rapid expansion and development of the higher education sector in Singapore calls for new approaches to university teaching that are adjusted to modern, more student centered, and technologically enabled learning contexts. Increasingly, higher education has been called on to prepare students to become capable of dealing with volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity as well as complexity …
Impact of Cultural Education on Social Cohesion after a Sudden Disaster: With Reference to Two Flood Affected Locations in Colombo
Unexpected disasters may destruct people’s day-to-day life. Recent history about disasters occurred in Sri Lanka shows that non-victims of disasters tend to sense that such situations as ‘our’ problem rather than ‘their’ problem. In order to create such shared collective feeling cultural teaching play noticeable role. During May 2016 Sri Lanka went through severe flooding …
Stealing from the Poor: A Challenge to Eradicating Poverty in Nepal
Background In 2015, an earthquake in Nepal killed over 9,000 people and destroyed over a million homes pushing millions of already poor further into destitute. Majority of the victims were native Tamang people and almost all of the devastated areas were their ancestral land Tamsaling. Almost two year has passed since the earthquake, the Nepal government …
Forced Departures and Fragmented Realities in Palestinian Memoirs
The Arabic word nakba means “catastrophe”. The Palestinians use this word to refer to the events that took place in Palestine before, during and after 1948. These events terminated both in the establishment of the state of Israel and the loss of Palestine. In the decades after 1948, the narratives of identity, exile and dispossession …
Prisms of History: Edward Said’s Humanism
The winding history of the Israeli-Arab dispute along with divergent historical, geopolitical and theological interpretations should be complicated for one to make definite moral judgment. However, the cross-cultural dynamics between the Israeli Jew and the Palestinian Arab and between the West and the East in general provide a historical and political context in which the …
“Everyone Has a Story to Tell: Learning English Through Narratives”
The present study is about the use of Narratives in the classroom of English especially where English is taught and learned as second language. In India, tradition of narratives is really ancient. Fables used to give moral values amongst children. But their use for learning second language makes it more interesting productive and outcome is …
A Study on Societal Conflict of the Selected Short Stories of Antonio Reyes Enriquez
Philippine Literature shows how the Filipino differs from others. (Richard V. Croghan, S.J, The Development Of Philippine Literature in English). This study presents to you with the different societal conflicts in the Philippines. a. There are three conflicts depicted in the selected short stories. These are (1) Man vs. Man, (2) Man vs. Society, (3) …
Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions
The main purpose of this study is to examine the modes of subjectivity and discourses of femininity and masculinity found in Thai romantic novels published in the 21th Century. First, I will discuss generic conventions in Thai romance. Additionally, I will seek to locate it within the socio-cultural contexts of Thai society, which influence the …
“Only When the Whole World Becomes One Family”: The Ideal Vision of a Eurasian
My paper benefits from Lisa Lowe’s idea of heterogeneity and multiplicity, Foucault’s notion of power, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. My ultimate aim is to challenge the binary axis of power by examining how Sui Sin Far, a pioneer of Asian American writer, enunciates to resist the mechanism of power which attempted to dominate and …
Resistance in Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories
Loss of identity is one of the major problems of all time. People who believe that domination destroy their true colors find resistance against the dominant as a result to maintain their identity. Literature is one of ways that best present voices and actions of people. This paper aims to analyze resistance against the domination …
Writing My Own Story: Memoir, Fictional Truth and Memory
Writing My Own Story: Memoir, Fictional Truth and Memory What does it mean to write your own story, from a literary and philosophical perspective? Writing a 100,000-word memoir covering ten years of my life (1995-2005) also forced me to consider the relationship between Truth (capital T), art as fictional truth (according to the history of literature, …
New Methods of Interaction in Virtual Reality for the Study of Archaeological Data
One of the biggest challenges that the analysis of archaeological data in virtual reality presents is the interaction. Within the project of reconstruction of Kaulonia archaeological site in Monasterace (Italy), developers had to deal with the need to implement an interface system inside the application without using external devices, in order to facilitate archaeologists in the …
A Study of the Fanpage Creators of Text/Illustration in Taiwan, in Particular with Their Working Process
With the popularity of high-speed internet, the number of using mobile phones has been increased in this generation, also known as high-tech generation. Nowadays, using mobile phone has become an irreplaceable part of our daily life. By using mobile phone, long description of sentences or words are difficult for understanding the meaning immediately. However, presented …
Humans and Animals in the Graphic Novel the Call of the Wild from the Perspective of Ecocriticism Reading
Nowadays, environmental crisis is one of the most important problems. Many people are affected by this crisis. Graphic novels can be used as a powerful tool to raise environmental awareness and urge people to protect the natural world. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between humans and animals in the graphic novel version of …
The Effect of Literary and Non-Literary Texts on EFL Students’ Critical Reading
Critical reading skills are important for all students around the world. Teaching these skills enables students to be critical readers and helps them to survive in the real world. However, it was found that many EFL students lack critical reading skills. The objective was to enhance EFL students’ critical reading skills. It focused on comparing …
Asian-Woman Mutedness in the Memoirs of Maxine Hong Kingston and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
The study analyses how woman muteness is revealed as self-portrait of the Asian-woman in the literary memoirs of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood among ghosts,” and Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s “Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian- American Memoir of Homelands.” The meta-textualities of Woman-roles and Woman-lingo of Muteness are synthesized as …
Annette Von Droste-Huelshoff and the Biedermeier Narrative
“Annette von Droste-Huelshoff and the Biedermeier Narrative” relates the aesthetics of the German Biedermeier period (1815-1848) to the life story of writer Annette von Droste-Huelshoff (1797-1848) and to her texts “Ledwina” (fragment/1820), “The Marl-Pit” (poem/1841), “The Jew’s Beech” (novella/1842) and “The Spiritual Year” (poetry/1851). Before all else, the Biedermeier cultivated the inner self through domesticity …
Value Orientation and Quality of Halal Certification in Cosmetics Business
At present, the accreditation of halal certification has been extending from food and beverage industry, to cover a wide variety of products and services, e.g. pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, perfumeries, and tourism. Thai entrepreneurs started to be more aware of halal certification, but not many of them have been applying for halal certificate. One of the obstacles …
Enhancing Vocabulary Learning by Using the Story-based Instruction
Vocabulary has been long believed to be one of the important elements in English learning. If students lack of vocabulary, their language skills will suffer. However, it was found that many students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms had problems in mastering vocabularies. This study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of the …
Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on Consumer Brand Engagement: A Study on Malaysian Youth
A growing area of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research is the CSR-consumer relationship. Today, organizations across all industries are facing increasing pressure to both sustain profitability and act in socially responsible manner. Consumers are becoming more demanding and appear concerned about patronizing brands engaged in CSR. Yet, not many researchers have looked into how consumers …
History in Fiction or Fiction in History: Enchi Fumiko’s Namamiko Monogatari as Historical Novel
While Hayden White asserts that historical discourses mirror literary writing, he also recognizes the value of narrativity in historical representations of reality. Many authors of historical discourses interpret and report their materials in narrative form, in the process of which the representation is governed by certain criteria of truth but also some degree of imagination. …
The Presentation of Rape in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak
With the raising number of reported rape cases, rape becomes one of the crucial social problems in worldwide. Mostly, women and girls are the main target of this violent crime. The violation on women’s body is an issue which has been discussed in many ways. Children’s literature is one of the powerful tools used for …
Cultivating Honesty: Salary and Corruption in the Yuan Through the Eyes of Officials and Scholars
The establishment of Chinese-style, centralized bureaucracy by Kublai beginning in 1260 was mirrored by the development of a payment structure for officials, a process which took almost two decades to complete. For the first time since the birth of the Mongol Empire in 1206, officials formally began receiving salaries from the government for their work. …
Documentary Storytelling: Methods and Styles
This article explores the significance of storytelling and seeks to choose modes of filmmaking to transmit “reality” or to tell a “true” story. However, the storyteller’s intention, perspective, values, and aesthetic style are integral parts of the story. Therefore, documentary storytelling does not refer only, or even primarily, to films that are narrated. Methods and …
The Pain as Ikigai in the Filmography of Hirokazu Koreeda
Hirokazu Koreeda is a Japanese film director and screenwriter who became famous, in the last decade, both in Japan and in the West. His filmography has a special quality related to the Japanese concept of ikigai. It is not easy to translate ikigai. It seems to be a feeling related to the “reason to live”. …
Transition of Environmental Art: In Search of the Strategies for Sustainability
The range of work referred as Environmental Art encompasses a wide variety of post-war art making and has been given a number of labels such as Land Art, Earthworks, Eco-Art etc. While its definition is constantly changing, its development largely reflects the evolution of eco-thought. In the 1960s numerous artists conceived Environmental Art chiefly to oppose …
Storytelling and Playing with History: The Ludic in French and Chinese Fiction
This paper explores how the device of storytelling can be used in fiction to construct a specifically ludic i.e. playful and gamelike literature. I compare two novels as a case-study: the 20C French writer Georges Perec’s La Vie, mode d’emploi (Life: a User’s Manual) and the 19C Chinese scholar Li Ruzhen’s fantasy novel Flowers in …
Meaning in Terms: A Monosemic Approach to the Lexical Semantics of English and Japanese Terms Taken from Narrative Contexts
This presentation aims to look at a possible monosemy of English and Japanese terms taken from narratives by Natsume Soseki and Virginia Woolf. Monosemy, the univocal relationship between a term and its meaning, appears to be a rare phenomenon. Contemporary critics have so far focused on the polysemic nature of terms (Lyons 1977; Cruse 1999), …
Foreign Policy and Identity Politics: Trump and Brexit through Putnam’s Too Level Games
In 2016, two major advanced democracies held consequential plebiscites that will impact the conduct of their respective future foreign policies. Putnam observed that foreign policy decisions are invariably affected by the pressures placed on the political executive’s international imperatives as a result of domestic agenda concerns. Since the communitarian challenge to liberal philosophy emerged from …
Ned Kelly: The Multiple Truths of Australia’s Most Famous Bushranger
In a line-up of all the Australian criminals, who sparked fear in the community and generated business for the law and justice systems in the colonial era, no individual stands taller than Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly of Victoria. Of all the bushrangers it is Kelly, and his Gang, who maintains a prominent place within Australian history …
Textile Practices as Media for Narrating Local Story
In this study, mainly the living materials of my hometown and its spatial imaginations will be explored through textile practices, and be transformed into the subject matters of designs. Some humane images in local places will be investigated, in expectation to review the connection between the designer and the places where he/she live, in order …
Making Human Network Visible through Costume Making and Scaffolding: A Fieldwork Study of Cosplay Culture
This paper analyzes the relationship between agencies and artifacts represented in ethnographic case studies of ten female informants aged 20-25 participating in the cosplay community. Cosplay is a female-dominated niche subculture of extreme fans and mavens, who are devoted to dressing up as characters from manga, games, and anime. “Cosplayers” are highly conscious of quality …
Folktales, Myths and Legends on Sculptors of South India
History speaks on sculptures and silent on sculptors; whereas folktales take contradictory position towards this phenomenon. The folktales, Myths and legends on sculptors of south India narrate the dark shades of the life of sculptors. The present paper is intended to explore the tales from south India and hypothetically propose the four processes occurring in …
Learning and Teaching Through Social Fabrication: From an Ethnographic Study in “Fablab Kamakura”
This paper analyzes the relationship between participation and learning represented in ethnographic case studies of ten informants aged 23-59 participating in a common-based peer production site, the FabLab Kamakura community. Digital-based personal fabrication is a new wave culture of mavens, who are devoted to alternatives to mass production, and are on a mission “to make …
The Effects of Product Placement in Malaysian Movies and Its Influence on Consumer Behavior
Product placement has been widely used through the international film industry, but has seldomly been used in Malaysian films. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of product placement in Malaysian movies as a catalyst for product purchasing behavior. The methods used for this study is textual and content analysis to study …
The Structure of Narrative Design. A Case Study: Interior Design Proposal of Thread of Life Gallery in Bali
When an exhibition is designed with object-oriented approach, merely focuses on conservation, display and object information, visitors often don’t understand the object. The design function as a medium of visual communication is failed. The exhibition design should be user centered and the goals are communicating objects and their context to visitors in order to make …
Communal Harmony in Goa: Assessing Attitudes and Devising Strategies for Promotion
Communal harmony is a word that became immensely loaded with political implications for India after the Babri Masjid demolition that took place in 1992. The shock waves resulting from that game changer, were felt nation-wide. However Goa, the smallest state of India, was considerably undisturbed because it had a long tradition of peaceful coexistence that …
‘It Was As Silly As All Women’s Stories’: Female’s Marginalisation and the Duality of Gender in the 20th Century West African Novel
When the simple act of talking is considered ‘silly’, or worst ‘madness’, here we should stop and look back at such a situation. This was my reaction when I first came across African novels. Novels, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Gabriel Okara’s The Voice (1964), both have a limited number of …
The Spatial Narration of Drawing Media and Its Transition of Cultural Representation
Drawing and representational media are means for artists, designers and architects to convey ideas or narratives happened in places. In the architectural field, architects utilise drawing media to represent physical architectural spaces or to demonstrate their viewpoints on spatial configuration. Since the invention of perspective in Renaissance, architectural spaces presented through perspectival drawings could have …
The Communication Approach for Conservation Palm Leaves Text of Sungmen Temple, Thailand by Buddhism Dharma
The purpose of this article is to explain the Communication approach for conservation palm leaves texts of Sungmen Temple, Thailand by Buddhism dharma. The methodology for this study including opinion leader in-depth interview such as a monk and a local Wisdom, Participant and Non- participant Observation and related literature reviews. It was found that in …
Exploring the Relationships among Innovation Diffusion Roles, Brand Communities Engagement Effect on Virtual Brand Communities
In recent years, the number of people using online communities continued to rise. The study found that more and more consumers find and evaluate desired goods through social media networks, as marketers also continue to improve their marketing skill, not only to promote brand recognition, but more importantly, to increase user participation. However, the link …
Roman Histories by Louis Kahn
The architecture of Louis I. Kahn changed radically in the 1950s. Such was the transformation that it is difficult to find its unmistakable tracks in works so different like the miesian Parasol House (1944) or the palladian Fleisher House (1959). All these differences have been widely recognized by leading architectural critics, and some of them …
Stories We Tell Our Selfies
Selfies have become a common social practice for a significant number of people throughout the world. While some criticise selfies as attention seeking or narcissistic, others have argued that they are a form of visual diary and a way for an individual to tell their own story. This would make them a kind of autobiography …
A Study on the Core Concepts of Environmental Aesthetics Curriculum
1.Background/ Objectives and Goals Environmental aesthetics is one of the newly emerging aesthetics concepts of the 20th century; it originated as a reaction to Kant’s “disinterested” aesthetics judgment as well as classical arts, pursuing instead the study of the aesthetic appreciation of natural and human environments. In a broad sense, by exploring the meaning of environmental …
Profiling the Academic Wordlist in Research Project of EFL University Students
The current study is a corpus-based lexical study that purposes to question the use of words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in research in the field of linguistics and applied linguistics. We compiled and investigated 52 research projects of EFL university students comprising of 1,071,558 words, which called the Research Project Corpus (RP). …
A Historical Review of Media Coverage on the Southernmost Unrest of Thailand
In a general manner, journalists rely upon conflict as a conventional method of framing news reporting. Be faced with the pressure of strained resources and their perception that media audiences prefer this reportorial style, journalists resort to conflict-based reporting. The approach often exacerbates the conflict by the very nature of the reportage. Using an unrest …
High Frequency Key Words in Tourism English in Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Approach
Tourism English is a new approach in the field of English for Specific (ESP) and it has its own linguistics style. The aim of the current study is to analyze the most frequent and important vocabulary in the area of tourism. The data are extracted from a small corpus amounting of 246,601 words, compiled from …
Chinese Dolls: The Spiritual Pain of Chino-Thai Women
The Chinese tradition is mainly rooted in patriarchal kinship, which regulates the role and status of Chinese women within familial and social aspects of their culture. The objective of this paper is to explain the process of connecting and transferring the feelings, memories, and experiences of Chinese migrant women in Chino-Thai culture by combining the …
The “Anti-Hungry, Anti-Civil War” Movement at Yenching University
In May 1947, there was a student protest called “Anti-Hungry, Anti-Civil War” Movement, which played a key role in overthrowing the Kuomintang government, and instigating students to support the Chinese Communist Party(CCP). During the protest, Yenching University, as a Christian University, took full use of its advantages to participate in the protest unexpectedly. Yenching was …
Historical Notes on Japanese Bunkers in General Santos City, Philippines
This is a qualitative study employing historical-descriptive methods of research. Key informant interview, ocular investigation, and documentary analysis were used to gather pertinent data. Significantly, this paper is an attempt to revisit the socio-cultural and economic situations in General Santos City, southern Philippines, during the Japanese occupation only by interpreting stories and narratives revolving around …
Comparing Robot Embodiments for Social Human-Robot Interaction of a Health Coach Service
As robotics technologies are advancing at an ever increasing rate, various types of service robots have emerged in the market and focused on assisting people through social interaction. This study aims to investigate the effects of robotic platforms on users’ perception of a socially assistive robot. A three-condition experiment was constructed, by using a commercially …
Beyond “Sex and the Family”: Revisionist Historiography in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
Until the early nineties and due to various reasons, the experiences of (Korean) comfort women were edited out of Korean and Japanese historical narratives, highlighting how power dynamics and different agendas lead to the sanitization and censoring of historical records. In her novel Comfort Woman (1997), Nora Okja Keller positions Akiko, a survivor of Japanese …
Seeking for New Values: Failure and Crisis of Models in Tsukamoto’s and Kurosawa’s Tokyo Films
The postwar Japan was subject to deep identity mutations as a result from the defeat and the social reforms often dictated by the American occupant. Only in 1951, after the end of the occupation the postwar “Japanese miracle” of the 1950s and the 1960s emphasized by new economic prosperity and international reputation. And yet, starting …
Vision and Memory: A Film History of the Royal Factories of Rural Thailand
King Rama IX initially established four Royal Factories in 1972 to enhance the quality of life of rural marginalized minorities, including Hmong, Chinese, and Yao, in the Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Sakon Nakorn and Burirum provinces of Thailand. The purpose of this project is to juxtapose the vision of King Rama IX with the memories …
The Contingency of the Self’s Language: How We Create Our Stories by Using Language
The most important part that creates the Self as “the knowing subject” or active entity with the proactive, purposeful and selective reception of the materials from reality, not merely a machine moved by external interactions is cognitive elements or consciousness framework. When we understand the cognition is a thinking process, the consciousness is the result …
Ambiguous Japan: A Study on Four Lectures of Nobel Prize Winner Kenzaburo Oe
In 1994, Kenzaburō Ōe, second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, entitled his Nobel Lecture “Japan, the ambiguous, and myself”, dialoguing with his predecessor, Yasunari Kawabata, whose Nobel Lecture was entitled “Japan, the beautiful, and myself”. Confessing his quest for “ways to be of some use in the cure and reconciliation of …
The Story of the Silk Road and Nara’s Shosoin Treasure Repository of the Emperor
The story of the Silk Road is, inter alia, the most fascinating narrative of mutual cultural, linguistic, literary, artistic and religious influences that occurred among the nations and tribes that existed along the Silk Road. The Silk Road trade included various types of goods, from those that had certain economic value, such as silk, jade, …
Seeking the Reality: Japanese Avant-Garde During the 1920s/30s and the Collage Technique
With the invention of the so-called ‘montage’ technique, the avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 20th century not only revolutionized art but they also changed the reception of art works. In the course of the 15th century a traditional way of representation and storytelling was established in European paintings by using a central perspective …
The History of Tuna Fishing in Tambler, General Santos City, Philippines
This study presents the historical evolution of tuna fishing in Tambler, General Santos City with emphasis on the fishing methods. The paper focuses only on the tuna offshore fishing; sub-industries activities like fish marketing, smoking, canning, exporting and value-added processing would be discussed if deemed necessary but considered beyond the study. As a qualitative research, …