In a world in which interracial conflicts and tensions seem to have become an inevitable phenomenon of daily life, one of the effective ways to teach respect for diversity is through education. Although people in society are more knowledgeable about the nature of global acceptance, the idea of equal-status situation and mutual expectations, racial discrimination proliferates. The multidimensional effects of Computer Information Technology (CIT) can have a direct effect on the role of anonymity that challenges the government and reflects issue...

This article examines ways of effective reading of non-Asian literary texts in Asian contexts, e.g. in a predominantly Thai classroom, among others. It puts forth essential elements of student-centeredness that need to be implemented and analyzes useful teaching strategies. To this end, Their Eyes Were Watching God by African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston has been selected as a model on which objectives, guidelines, questions, activities and stages of literary analysis are based. The article culminates in a discourse on the issue of i...

The term "proxemics" was coined by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall to describe the relationships between people in terms of the distances and spaces they set up in their societies which shape the ways they behave towards each other. For Hall, these spaces are the "hidden languages" of a culture which contribute to the meanings of other communication acts individuals in that culture perform. As Hall argues, each culture shapes and interprets these spaces in different ways. While Hall looks at the role of these spaces in art, he does not dev...

This paper proposes to illustrate what is possible in the classroom to help learners to see texts as problematical; to be critically aware of literacy as a phenomenon and as a consequence for the learner to be assertive in their interaction with text. At the same time it is hoped to show how Information Technology can be used as a tool in the analysis of texts. The study will focus on samples taken from a novel published locally for the English speaking market in Southeast Asia. The choices made by the writer in both lexis and grammar will ...

Difficult as it may be to talk about a unified category of "Asian Horror Film," this article originates from an observation that in a great majority of Asian horror films (exemplified in this research by japanese, South Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese, Thai, Taiwanese, Singaporean and Vietnamese films) the horror film is almost equivalent with the "ghost" film. At the same time, it is relatively easy to notice that the celluloid representations of Asian spirits frequently do not comply with the Hollywood-established patterns, easily recognisable to...

The idea of ideas is potentially an illusive language claim. Whether as a word, as a concept, it implies an existential phenomenon which raises epistemological issues of how language shapes what we believe we know. The delineation and explication of ideas requires an examination of the roles of metaphor in such discourse. Considered from a cross-cultural perspective the fact that the concept idea recurs in various languages suggests at least a functional need as a reality creating device, a linguistic tool in the explications of our social d...

This paper is based on the creative writing course (also known as the "creative writing workshop") at Assumption University, Bangkok, Thailand. The first section of the paper will make a case for poetry as a resource for language learning and creative writing. I will also demystify the traditional notion of poetry as deviant, abstruse, and difficult for language learners. The theoretical points will be based on Spiro's (2004) McRae's (1991), and Tomlinson's (1986) research on reasons for and ways of using poetry in the language classroom. ...