Essay: mood n. And feeling n.

Essay: mood n. And feeling n.

Korean students often confuse the English expressions mood and feeling. Part of the difference between the two is meaning: mood is the way someone is feeling at a particular time, whereas feeling is reacting to the things emotionally. The difference between the two expressions is not only in meaning, but also in usage. To find out the difference in usage between the two expressions, I examined 100 KWIC concordance lines from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008-). This technique revealed typical phrases in which the expressions mood and feeling to usually occur.

Because there come similar propositions and adjectives in the vicinity of mood and feeling, it is hard to find difference between them just by comparing the result of searching in corpus. It becomes more clear when it is considered as a part of a phrase. That was “in the mood of [something]”. Similarly, mood appeared in the phrases “in the mood for [something]” and “in the mood to [something]”. These examples show that mood is often used to tell that someone wants to do something. Likewise, feeling is followed by prepositions. In the sample concordance lines, the phrases “feeling for [someone]” talk about someone’s love and affection toward some others.

Unlike mood, Feeling can be experienced. According to the concordance lines, there are phrases “Feeling of [something]” and “feeling in [one’s part of body]”. When it is used “I have feeling of hunger”, the speaker can experience his hunger. Also in the case of “He has feeling in his legs”, he can experience something in his leg. In contrast, mood cannot refer something which can be experienced.

Both expressions sometimes refer negative emotion. Mood sometimes appeared in phrases such as “someone is in a mood.” It means that someone is angry. In the same way, “hurt someone’s feeling” and “for someone’s feeling” talk negative emotion like embarrassed, offend or upset.

The corpus study indicated some differences in meaning in phrase between mood and feeling.  I expect that learning these typical patterns will help Korean students use mood and feeling more naturally.

Reference:

Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

To a Daughter Leaving Home : good to teach to high school students.

image credit: kim eunji (me)

@Sapporo, Hokkaido

The high school students of today is really busy for getting higher grade to get in univercity. The education system of Korea pushes them to do so. They became smart within this system, but they lost their sensitivity. They got intelligence without warm heart. They learned the world of the survival of the fittest, but they hardly learn the world of love. It made Korean education system notice the needs of literature study in high school. But the poems and stories on the textbook is too complicated for the students of high school. Students need literature which are easy to understand and to know the love through it.  I, therefore, recommend a poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home” to be taught in the classroom.

The poem is suitable to teach to high school students for it is talking about the love of parents. first, students can think of the feeling of their parents. Parents are trees. They are always there and staring their kids. Even if the kids are leave them, they keep watching their children with love and sadness. And they let the kids be move freely unless they get harmed. It is not because they do not care about their kids. It is because they believe that the kids learn from the failure. They are like shelter where the kids can go when they were hurt. Also, students can reflect themselves. High school students are adolescents. They do not want to stay with their parent. Reading this poem, they can reflect what they had done to their parents. And also notice that the parents is alway wait for them to look back with reading this poem.

Teaching this poem is nice for high school students because there are easy words to understand with usable expressions. first, students can learn some grammatical constructions. In the poem, It says “I Kept waiting”. In this sentence, students can see ‘keep -ing’ form and use it later. And It says “While you grew smaller, more breakable”. With this sentence, students can get the comparative degree form : -er and more -. Also, students can meet new creative expressions in the poem. There are some beautiful expression. One is “as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise.” The speaker describes his/her own mouth’s shape like a wheel. And other one is “pumping, pumping for your life,”. The pedal of the bicycle is described the independence of the kid. These kind of metaphor make the reader feel excited.

To sum up, I recommend “To a Daughter Leaving Home” to be taught in high school for two main reason : The message and the linguistic usage of this poem. This poem is telling the love of parents. It can make student to think of their own parents and reflect themselves. By studying this poem, students can learn grammatical construct and creative expressions.