융합시대의 영문학의 역활 : 독서치료를 통한 영어 학습부진아 교육과 치유

The Role of English Literature in the Era of Convergence: Bibliotherapy for EFL Underachievers and Struggling Learners

Because of social, cultural, economic, academic, and family stress factors, increasing number of EFL learners in Korea are at greater risk of being EFL underachievers and struggling learns. The goal of this study is to explore how Lacanian psychoanalysis can be applied to the process of bibliotherapy, developmental and clinical, thus offering a convergence of ego psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to promote a more efficient therapeutic interventions for EFL underachievers and struggling learners. Showing how ego psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis can share much to offer to each other in explicating the cognitive and psychological mechanisms involved in the interactions between readers (patiences) and texts, this study proposes how Lacan’s theories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, desire, signifiers, images, defense mechanism, ego-ideal, ideal ego, the Other, jouissance, objet a, and fantasy can offer valuable insights into ways in which bibliotherapy is assumed by ego psychology to work. Articulating Lacanian perspectives in line with those of ego psychology, this study attempts to explain how texts affect readers in a therapeutic way, converging those two fields and offering a psychoanalytic understanding of cognitive and psychological mechanisms of bibliotherapy. Thus, proposing this as a basis for educating EFL teachers in the proper implementation of bibliotherapy in the EFL classroom and carrying out a more educational interventions for EFL underachievers and struggling leaners, this study also suggests that the roles of English literature for use in bibliotherapy with EFL underachievers and struggling learners go beyond the field of education into other areas in the era of convergence.