1
Assessing English Lexical Syllabus for High School Student regarding
Academic Vocabulary
Kasin Janjaroongpak
This paper aims to investigate the issue of validity of the Lexical Syllabus (LS)
created by Ministry of Education around forty years ago. The research question deals with the
extension of applicability of the syllabus judging from the comparison with Academic Word
List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000). The list of words that exist in AWL but not in LS, called “final
list”, is extracted via a concordance programme named AntConc. The findings reveal at least
two significant issues. First, according to the final list, many verbs found in AWL do not
appear in LS. Second, the words in the final list account for more than a half of the words in
the AWL. The pedagogical implication is that students in High School should have more
exposure to the academic words especially verbs. Teachers should put the issue of frequency
and saliency into consideration whence utilising the list by prioritising words that have high
rank (10 to 6) of frequency before words that have low frequency (5 to 1). In conjunction
with the final list, teachers can use texts stored in BNC as a learning source introducing
lessons in a form of an academic article with vocabulary deemed to be taught in class. In
addition, the knowledge of the words that are taught in class can be further enhanced by
examining concordance lines of the words in question and this will augment learners’
language description of the English language.
2
Discourse Analysis of Royal News:
A Comparative Study of Royal News in Thailand and Britain
Chonlada Bangluangsanti
This study aims to investigate the style of royal news published in Thailand and
Britain, focusing on the lexical features of the text. The comparative analysis of keywords in
a corpus of Thai royal news and a corpus of British royal news revealed that Thai and British
royal news are different in many respects. Proper nouns and content words in Thai royal
news involve a wider range of issues than those in its British counterpart, thus implying more
various kinds of social activities Thai royals have been engaged with. The abundance use of
pronouns in British news and their absence in Thai news suggest that Thai and British media
employ different ways to address the royals. The overall results show that Thai royals are
presented in the media as being patrons of many social activities and are praised by several
honorary words, while British royals are presented in the British news more like celebrities
or stars, with only a few types of activities mentioned and a few honorary words applied.
3
Contemporary Australian Literature and the Questioning of Australian
National (Un)Identity: Voices of the Marginalised in Three Recent Novels
Thanis Bunsom
As a former European colony in the heart of Asia-Pacific, a modern nation-state
founded on a land with the world’s most ancient culture, and a settler society composed out
of waves of diverse migration from all over the world, Australia has never had a simple
relationship to notions of national identity. Long perceived as a problem, Australian national
identity has been the site of intense struggle and debate, subject to an almost endless process
of revision and change. Originally patterned after 19th century European models of
mythological nationalism, early discourses of national identity sought to canonize select
places, people and abstract characteristics—most of which were almost exclusively AngloCeltic—as defining myths of ‘Australian-ness.’ However, in the second half of the 20th
century amidst a period of intense demographic and cultural change, the Australian
government officially adopted multiculturalism as the defining national policy. This idealistic
proposal was meant to recognise and promote the diverse transcultural nature of Australia as
a polyglot nation of diverse races and ethnicities but the shift has not been a simple or easy
one. Debates around multiculturalism have become a focal point in a lot of contemporary
Australian literature, no more so than in the work of authors from non-Anglo ethnic
backgrounds. These writers frequently chart the dilemmas faced by non-Anglo minorities
who have long been present in Australia but who have note been fully represented within the
available narratives of Australian national identity. This paper analyses three recent novels by
Australian authors as representative examples of this trend. Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage
(1983), Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) and Hsu Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo (2000), all
portray the non-Anglo immigrant’s hardship in trying to fit in to mainstream Australian
society and the quandary of not being able to call Australia their true ‘home.’ The readings
are framed and supported by a critical interrogation of Jacques Derrida’s theory of
hospitality.
4
“I, Too, Have a Voice:
A Comparative Study of the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne
Sexton On Women’s Struggle in the Patriarchal Society”
Sarittanee Nitikarn
Women's life has always been confined in a patriarchal world. Women have made
several attempts to break away from social conventions and to achieve a better position in
society. One factor which enables them to move closer to their goal is education.
Opportunities in a professional world still seem limited. This essay will discuss the life and
works of two female American poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton, whom I
consider as two representatives of the first and second of the twentieth century. Their works
feature personal lives of women who try to assert themselves and their power into a male
domineering world. The analysis of the poems of Millay and Sexton aims to prove that
women's liberation has not fully achieved. There have only been attempts and progress;
nevertheless, women have much to do to establish their place in the world that has long been
dominated by men.
5
Literary Body Language from the Victorian Period to Modernism and
Post-World War II Society
Sasapin Siriwanij
This research paper explores works by three major authors from different periods –
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, some of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, and Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot - to illustrate that body language in relation to verbal communication
in literature falls into greater discrepancies, reflecting changes in worldview from the Victorian
Period to Modernism and eventually post-World War II. Body language is usually present in
literature, accompanying human characters’ interaction with one another. Although often taken
for granted, literary body language’s function is significant, revealing their emotional, mental,
and social conditions that spoken language does not or cannot do. In Great Expectations, body
language is closely related to spoken language in that it adds psychological dimensions to the
characters, while speeches remain the major vehicle of significant messages. However, spoken
language begins to lose truthfulness and significance to body language when Ernest
Hemingway’s short stories are explored; in a modernist world, a skeptic view towards the world
affects even the reliability of language, while body language still reflects true states of mind of
characters. In Waiting for Godot, body language and spoken language move further apart as they
sharply contradict each other until any communication becomes ambiguous, reflecting the
tendency towards meaninglessness of Post-World War II ideologies.
6
Sexual Panic and the Struggle for Sexual Power in
Victorian Vampire Literature
Supika Kamalanavin
The struggle for sexual power between male and female has long been a universal
issue, and the theme of sexuality has often recurred in the history of mankind. This paper
aims to explore this universal battle between men and women during the Victorian era,
where, while the issue about sexuality was suppressed, there was paradoxically more
literature relating to sexual behaviors and relationships than ever before. As one of the
popular forms of the novel during the nineteenth century, vampire literature is believed to be
the most prominent genre to portray the hidden sexual anxieties shared by people in the same
society. With an attempt to understand the sexual repression during nineteenth-century
England that developed into sexual panic at the turn of the century, selections of vampire
literature such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre; A Tale (1819), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla (1872), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) will be fully discussed. The focus of the
paper will be on vampirism as an instrument of self-empowerment and on the portrayal of
homosexuality and sexual inversion with its connection to the power struggle between
genders in the novels selected.
7
Ethical Concerns in Huxley's Brave New World and
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Santichai Preechaboonyarit
This paper explores and compares the two novels from the different periods of
time: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
(2005). Even though, on the surface, these two novels seem to deal with the same issue- the
malevolent use of science and the nature of a controlled society, there are significant
differences between these two literary works in terms of their intention, their main message
and their manner of presentation. While Huxley’s novel aims to warn its readers about the
world in their real imminent future, when science became the tool of an authoritarian
minority clique to overrule others and the world saw the rise of totalitarian regimes, Ishiguro
seems to be more concerned with the ethical issues associated with the advancement of
ostensibly benign scientific techniques. While Huxley’s work is presented in a
straightforward approach, the complication of the latter lies in the way Ishiguro presents his
novel. Initially, his toneless first- person narrative perplexes the reader but the blandness of
tone becomes crucial in raising the reader’s awareness of the maltreatment of the Hailsham
students and their kind who the ‘normal’ people regard as less than human.