Department of English

This study investigates the effectiveness of explicit instruction on text structure in the development of Japanese EFL college students’ English writing skills by examining two research questions: (1) How does students’ writing change after being given lessons on explicit instruction and process writing?; and (2) How do students’ perceptions of English writing change due to process writing and explicit instruction on text structure? Two groups of students were given four lessons on process writing and explicit instruction. While one group of advanced-level students wrote an argumentative essay, the other group with beginner-level students wrote a descriptive essay. The results suggest that explicit instruction on text structure can be a useful means of developing English writing skills regardless of students’ English proficiency levels. Students self-report indicated that their ability to organize ideas was highly improved, and they exhibited positive changes in writing in terms of ...

The purpose of this study, conducted as a follow-up study of , was to examine whether Japanese EFL students' use of vocabulary changed after being given lessons on explicit instruction on text structure and process writing. Two groups of college students-the beginner-level group writing a descriptive essay and the advanced-level group writing an argumentative essay-wrote an outline, the first draft (D1), the second draft (D2), and the final draft (FD), and I examined the differences in lexical richness between students' D1 and FD with New Word Level Checker . The results showed that both groups' drafts had changed in the number of words used (tokens), the number of unique words used (types), and the number of lower frequency words used. This study's finding also supports the importance of choosing an appropriate measurement to analyze students' vocabulary levels. For Japanese students, 1K-word bands, which have been widely used in previous literature, seem too broad to capture their small vocabulary improvement.

Between 1997 and 2007 the foreign population of Japan increased by more than 45 % making it the largest at any time in the postwar period, constituting 1.69 % of the overall population. At the same time, the transborder flows of people, capital and media increased at an unprecedented rate. In the Japanese media, there has been a marked increase in the number of television programs featuring non-Japanese. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of non-Japanese residents of Japan on variety television programs and shows that the increase of foreign faces on Japanese television is significant as non-Japanese residents are used here to reinforce ideas of Japanese cultural identity. These programs, while usually advertised as opportunities to look at issues from an international perspective, instead highlight perceived differences which exist between Japan and the outside world as a form of entertainment, rather than to seriously examine the issues Japan faces as it becomes more international. Employing a discourse analysis of recent programs as well as interviews with program participants, this paper examines media mechanisms which create an image of the foreign "other" that is employed to create, perpetuate and strengthen the idea of a unique Japanese cultural identity.

Pornography producers in Japan are finding themselves increasingly struggling to maintain profits as free content becomes ever more easily available online. Within this environment one niche area is bucking trends and increasing sales—pornography for women. In an industry where a DVD that sells 3,000 copies is considered a hit, female-friendly pornography company Silk Labo has been able to not only produce DVDs which sell over 10,000 copies, but also generate publicity about the company and its aims which reaches far beyond neighbourhood DVD rental stores, and contributes to a wider conversation about women, sex, and pleasure in Japan today. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and critical analysis of Silk Labo films to understand the phenomenon of increasing consumption of pornographic content by women in contemporary Japan, and asks whether the phenomenon is subversive or feminist.
Keywords: Japan, women, female-friendly porn, feminist pornography, Silk Labo, eromen

In this article I examine two very different types of male porn stars and the education texts in which they appearthe Higi Denju [Lessons in Secret Techniques] DVD and book series by veteran porn performer Kato Taka, and female-friendly porn production company Silk Labo's 'how to' films featuring Suzuki Ittetsu. Both huge stars in the porn industry, at first glance the two performers exemplify diametrically opposing images of masculinity. Through critical analysis of the work of Kato and Suzuki, this article contemplates the sexual identities on offer to men in Japan today and considers what these mean for notions of masculinity. I argue that despite appearing very different, ultimately the films and bookswhich I term pedagogical pornfeaturing Kato and Suzuki serve to reinscribe hegemonic understandings of masculinity, with Kato pushing forward a conservative view and Suzuki offering a 'new age' perspective on an old theme.

Phantasmagoria is an early projection show using an optical instrument called a magic lantern. Brought to Britain from France in 1801, it amused spectators by summoning the spirits of absent people, including both the dead and the living. Its form gradually changed into educational amusement after it came to Britain. However, with the advent of spiritualism, its mysterious nature was rediscovered in the form of what was called 'Pepper's Ghost'. Phantasmagoria was reborn in Britain as a purely ghostly entertainment, dealing only with spirits of the dead, because of the mixture of the two notions brought from France and the United States. This paper aims to shed light on the role that phantasmagoria played in Britain during the Victorian period, how it changed, and why. Through observing the transnational history of this particular form of entertainment, we can reveal a new relationship between the representations of science and superstitions.

The Victorian era was marked by great prosperity and the consuming culture of death. As a common rite of passage or a natural conclusion of human life, death at that time and under those economic circumstances became ‘popular’. It allowed commercial ventures to attract people’s attention by preying on their human nature and loss of the loved one. Against that background, there was rapid social growth and urbanization. Overpopulation and pollution led to infectious diseases, such as smallpox and cholera, which posed a great health threat—especially for infants living in London. Thus, in those times, the physical proximity between the dead and the living was very close in urban areas. The Victorian culture of death involved designing merchandise to support people in their deep mourning and depression. Accordingly, this paper argues that the Victorian merchandizing of death focused on three main mourning goods: cemeteries, funerals, and mourning dress. This study reveals how Victorian’...

Lloyd Fernando is one of three prose writers (the other two being Lee Kok Liang and K.S. Maniam) who should rightfully be considered at the forefront of Malaysian literature written in English. Despite stylistic differences, each of these authors, through their examination of postcolonialism, marginalisation, and the painful quest for cultural and racial unification, has asked significant questions concerning hybrid or ethnocentric identity. All three provide local settings pregnant with oppositions, all three employ shifting natural landscapes in their writing as backgrounds to the issues of multiple identity that have emerged from Malaysia's colonial past and multiracial present. Central to their beliefs, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, is that nation may only be achieved through dissemination and rebirth , and that acknowledgment of difference must lead first to acceptance-and then embracement-of racial and cultural 'otherness'.

What Lee Kok Liang is attempting in part in this novel is an exploration of self in the context of an environment that is both familiar to the author/narrator, given the Eurocentric epistemology of his colonial education and, at the same time, hostile and alienating. In the novel, London Does Not Belong To Me and his journal Sketches, Vignettes & Brush Strokes, upon which much of the action in the novel is based, the young (25-year-old) Lee charts a psychological map for his personal identity and artistic integrity -- against the backdrop of a London and Paris themselves being reinvented after the devastations of World War II.

童話
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
には無数の翻案があり、文章の質や種類は、出
版者や著者によって、あるいは対象とする読者の年齢層によって大きく異なるが、このような文体の相違や視覚的要素重視の度合いの差異は幼い読者にどのような
影響を与えるのであろうか。本論では、主に
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
の二つの版の分析を通して、童話という枠組が個々の作家の言語に及ぼしている影響、および、その言語についての読者の要望に及ぼしている影響について、文中の と
挿絵
の関連も考慮して、 証することを試みる。

Set in London and Paris in the early 1950s, the text is a semi-autobiographical account of the cultural and social displacement and colonial/postcolonial angst of its Malaysian narrator, and may be compared with similar writing by Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul. among others. The novel is Lee Kok Liang's first, conceived and written in the early 1950s, but published posthumously in 2003.

Introduction (written by Deborah Wyrick) to article:

Following a trajectory similar to the fictional Parvatheesam's, the young Malaysian writer Lee Kok Liang traveled to London for his law degree in the 1950s. During that time, as Bernard Wilson explains, Lee wrote a journal entitled Sketches, Vignettes, and Brushstrokes, a travelogue of sorts that tried to capture the places and people he encountered as well as his own meditations on writing and identity. His exilic sensibility allows him to construct a counter-Conradian Malaysian subjectivity formed in the uncharted territory between colonialism and independence; such subjectivity nurtures an artistic voice positioned between the chez soi and the hors-de-soi (see Levinas, TI 33) that speaks for, in Wilson's words, "the polarities that exist within himself and others." Lee's meetings with luminaries like Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol transcend East/West distrust or antagonism, achieving instead a cultural validation that leads to the 'accountability' characteristic of his works. Further, his musings on religion -- more specifically, his musings on European writers' Christianity -- cause him to re-think Buddhism, religious pluralism, plurality in all its constitutive Malaysian forms, and the need to speak the 'silent voices' of his new nation.

This essay provides an overview of four of the major writers of anglophone Malaysian literature since Malaysian independence in order to assess the supposed "evolution" of the thematic concerns within these texts. The anglophone literature of Malaysia has moved beyond traditional colonial/postcolonial binaries and is now as much represented through a prism of diaspora and transnationalism. While such a position provides fresh opportunities for a reinterpretation of Malaysian history and society and its broader relationship to the forces of globalization in terms of the perceived dissolution of national and cultural boundaries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it also carries with it the associated perils of accepting transition (or impermanence) as an oxymoronic, permanent state. The essay examines the role of each of the authors, from a biographical and textual perspective, in addressing these issues and finds that while a guarded resolution may be seen to take place for those authors whose work and lives have been predominantly located in Malaysia (Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando and K. S. Maniam), the prose fiction of Shirley Geok-lin Lim indicates progress on a transnational basis but regression on a more localised Malaysian scale.