Foreign Languages and Literature

This qualitative study aims to understand how English learners interpret shared space in an online multilateral English blogging context and how their interpretations of shared space contribute to their multilateral exchange experience. Twenty-four Asian learners of English from two different universities—one in Japan and one in Taiwan—participated in this study. These learners worked on their individual blogs and interacted on both their own blogs and on those of their partners. Data sources include surveys, online interaction records, class assignments, reflective journals, and interviews. Guided by Kramsch's (2009c) analogy of the mindsets of the structuralist and post-structuralist approaches in culture and communication, this study reported that students in this multilateral English blogging project interpreted shared space from two perspectives (a) commonality, and (b) relativity. While students who interpreted shared space from the perspective of commonality valued pre-existing shared personal interests, mutual understanding, and similar personal experiences as a prerequisite for inter-class blogging, students who interpreted shared space from the perspective of relativity tended to draw relative positions from a dialogue between their and their inter-class peers' historicity or cultural memories through re-contextualization and re-positioning. This study suggests that although students who interpreted shared space from the commonality perspective were able to engage in inter-class blogging, they faced difficulties in exploring other possibilities in relating to the blog content, the blog discussions, and the bloggers, when commonality was absent. However, for students who interpreted shared space from the relativity perspective, they were able to form relationships of possibility in mediating encounters through uses of heterogeneous semiotic resources. Future research on what barriers can hinder students' development due to interpretation of shared space and how students develop uses of symbolic resources can contribute to understanding students' construction of shared space for communication.

This study explores English language learners' crafting process of a digital storytelling project in an instructional setting. By analyzing two English language learners' digital storytelling projects and their personal crafting narratives, the researcher reports how these learners approach multimodal digital story composing, construct hybrid texts to deliver their messages, and assign meanings to the semiotic resources used in their digital story through Gunther Kress' (2003) notion of design. Three major findings are reported in this study. First, participants approached the development of multimodal digital storytelling with the creation of a hybrid text, and with dialogic orchestration of multimodal resources. Second, participants' digital story design and orchestration of multimodal resources were guided by author intents. Third, the study participants experienced imagination and re-imagination when assigning meaning to the semiotic resources used in their digital story. The incorporation of digital story composing narratives allows the researcher to develop deep understanding about multimodal designers' thinking process in constructing their digital stories. The findings of this study, illustrating the complex process of multimodal composing, are discussed in relation to learners' employment of multimodal resources, Kress' (2003) notion of design, and Leo van Lier's (2004) notion of affordance.

Prosthesis has been a useful medium for thinking about the identity of people with disabilities, who often rely on artificial devices in their daily lives. Recent advances in technology have altered the biological body via so-called enhancement technologies, which can augment bodily forms and functions to improve human characteristics. Given its corrective abilities, prosthesis has become the "interconstitutive" point which links body and machine, blurring the borderline between normal and abnormal, abled and disabled, human and cyborg. People with disabilities are no longer the only ones using prostheses to fix their bodily deficiencies; non-disabled people need them even more to modify their "imperfect" bodies. Being human, as Lennard Davis points out, has become "an aspect of supplementarity" (69). The essay will take a biocultural approach to the study of the scientificized and medicalized body to construct a dialectical discourse between ableism and dis/ability, the natural body and the artificial hybrid, humanity and technology, and related issues. Concurrently critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, the essay lays out a balanced and complex picture of the merging of flesh, machine, and subject, and, by doing so, offers a reconceptualization of dis/ability and post/humanity in a futurist society from the perspectives of materiality, metaphoricity, and reflexivity of prosthetics.

Prosthesis has been a useful medium for thinking about the identity of people with disabilities, who often rely on artificial devices in their daily lives. Recent advances in technology have altered the biological body via so-called enhancement technologies, which can augment bodily forms and functions to improve human characteristics. Given its corrective abilities, prosthesis has become the ＂interconstitutive＂ point which links body and machine, blurring the borderline between normal and abnormal, abled and disabled, human and cyborg. People with disabilities are no longer the only ones using prostheses to fix their bodily deficiencies; non-disabled people need them even more to modify their ＂imperfect＂ bodies. Being human, as Lennard Davis points out, has become ＂an aspect of supplementarity＂ (69). The essay will take a biocultural approach to the study of the scientificized and medicalized body to construct a dialectical discourse between ableism and dis/ability, the natural bod...

Prosthesis has been a useful medium for thinking about the identity of people with disabilities, who often rely on artificial devices in their daily lives. Recent advances in technology have altered the biological body via so-called enhancement technologies, which can augment bodily forms and functions to improve human characteristics. Given its corrective abilities, prosthesis has become the "interconstitutive" point which links body and machine, blurring the borderline between normal and abnormal, abled and disabled, human and cyborg. People with disabilities are no longer the only ones using prostheses to fix their bodily deficiencies; non-disabled people need them even more to modify their "imperfect" bodies. Being human, as Lennard Davis points out, has become "an aspect of supplementarity" (69). The essay will take a biocultural approach to the study of the scientificized and medicalized body to construct a dialectical discourse between ableism and dis/ability, the natural body and the artificial hybrid, humanity and technology, and related issues. Concurrently critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, the essay lays out a balanced and complex picture of the merging of flesh, machine, and subject, and, by doing so, offers a reconceptualization of dis/ability and post/humanity in a futurist society from the perspectives of materiality, metaphoricity, and reflexivity of prosthetics.

William Shakespeare is universally recognized as a lone eminence whose works, read, translated, performed, and rewritten worldwide on page and stage, have eclipsed his co-workers’ theatrical and literary productions then and now. While most modern scholars, empowered by Shakespeare’s thought, ‘cling at all costs to the post-Romantic image of him as a solitary genius who has no need of aid from lesser mortals’ (Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author, 2002), some leading researchers have attempted to place Shakespeare among his collaborative playwrights and attempted to construct the theatrical dialogue between them. I want to take the opportunity of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death to reflect on the significance of memorializing Shakespeare by asking an important question that has intrigued the entire theatrical community for years: ‘How much do we know the ways in which Shakespeare’s contemporaries made of him in their theatrical dialogue?’
I will first address the fundamental nature of collaborative playwriting where Shakespeare, like his colleagues, played a part. I will then trace evidence of the ways in which Shakespeare’s playwrights respond to his works, which constitute ‘proper knowledge’ set between texts and lives as legitimated by Richard Wheeler. This talk hopes to introduce new research directions in a broader context that will shed new light on what we want to know about Shakespeare’s life and work.