The present thesis is an in-depth examination of the potential of facilitating reflective practice in the educational world of Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Higher Education. More specifically, the current thesis investigates the impact of Guided Reflective Practice on the practice of five university teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Cyprus. Although language research increasingly acknowledges the importance of reflection in excavating the personal, individual and emotional nature of teachers’ work, educational policies and professional teaching standards tend to overlook the humanistic and emotional dimensions of the teacher’s role. Teachers are passionate human beings and their identity, behaviour and emotions are intimately connected with their personal beliefs and values, thus their reflective selves. At the same time, emotions are also socially constructed and a teacher’s behaviour emerges as a result of interactions with others. Successful teacher interactions, however, presuppose an environment of trust, openness and willingness. In such a context, the individual can feel free to both engage in a journey of self-awareness and co-construct knowledge in a reflective dialogue with others who can facilitate the reframing of pre-existing beliefs and practices. Few empirical studies exist which illustrate the incorporation of reflective practice as a facilitative and developmental tool offered to Higher Education English as a Foreign Language in-service teachers in a co-educational and appreciative environment. The main purpose of this investigation is the increased understanding of ‘self’ and EFL practice through learning to apply reflective practice as a vehicle for mindful and caring interactions with others. The study incorporates insights from humanistic learning theory, relational cultural theory and critical constructivism. It also examines the ways in which the research process has influenced and reshaped my practice and identity as English as a Foreign Language educator and reflective facilitator. I link my research commitment to my belief in the uniqueness of the individual and the importance of learning as a result of building human relationships through reflective and dialogical interactions with others. Using an action inquiry methodology and qualitative data collection and analysis, the study endeavoured to address three research questions by investigating the teachers’ perceptions of the impact of guided reflective practice and assessing their response to the process. Data collection methods included reflective journals, reflective inquiry group meetings, dialogue observation sessions based on video-recordings, online chats, and holistic interviews. From the present study emerged the Collaborative, Appreciative, Reflective Enquiry (CARE) model for teacher development, revealing new understandings and insights for TEFL through practices in which emotions are a primary catalyst for transformational teacher learning. The proposed CARE model of guided reflective practice constitutes an alternative framework which identifies ways of facilitating and operationalising reflection in an ‘acritical’ and appreciative context, highlighting its emancipatory potential as a tool for growth and development and not as an institutional requirement. I am claiming that the significance of my research lies in the fact that it offers new conceptualisations vis-à-vis the capacity of teachers of Higher Education English as a Foreign Language to learn and maximise their potential through reflection when they feel appreciated as individuals and educators. More specifically, findings about participants’ and my own learning reveal an increased self-awareness and awareness of practice, an ability to critically reflect on context without being judgmental of others, and a willingness to reframe practice. More importantly, however, findings show a felt appreciation for the therapeutic effects of reflection and a positive approach to practice as a result of being guided and supported in the reflective practice process by understanding others. Implications include the significance of appreciative reflective practice in teacher interactions and collaboration, of teacher agency in the knowledge production in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and the importance of positive emotionality in empowering teachers to live out their identities and values in practice. It is my hope that this small pocket of teacher reform in the study can pave the way forward to similar reform initiatives in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language domain that would entail human connectedness and caring in teacher learning through reflection.

This research focuses on the contrastive analysis of authentic persuasive business correspondence written in English by Thai speakers and native English speakers in the Thai business context. Three types of persuasive correspondence - sales promotion, request, and invitation - were analysed from contrastive text linguistic and pragmatic perspectives. The purpose was to examine, compare and contrast their rhetorical structures, functions and linguistic realisations as well as persuasive and politeness strategies, and to compare these features to those found in textbook samples of persuasive letters in order to investigate the extent to which those samples represent the authentic, real-life correspondence. The findings report on cross-cultural variations which differentiate the persuasive writing patterns and strategies of Thais and native English speakers. Despite some shared writing conventions, the findings reveal diversity in some rhetorical moves, linguistic realisations, rhetorical appeals and politeness strategies. The diversity includes some cultural-bound discourse patterns and cultural-specific textual features, many of which can be traced to interference from the Thai language and culture. An exploration of the nature of sales promotion, request, and invitation letters presented in one American and two Thai textbooks on Business English writing reveals that their letter samples reflect the characteristics of the authentic corpus in the business contexts to which they belong. The implications of this research are twofold. First, it has implications for the teaching of English business letter writing especially in the Thai context and the innovation of more advanced materials and methods for this pedagogical purpose. Second, it raises an awareness of differences in persuasive writing across languages and cultures, worth noting for developing cross-cultural understanding and communication strategies for effective intercultural business interactions in the dynamic business environment of the 21st century.

This study argues for EFL teacher autonomy and empowerment in Saudi higher education institutions based on the assumption that participating in school decision-making would help to enhance teachers’ perceptions, expertise, and commitment towards their own practices. This research is teacher-centred in the sense that it is written from the teacher’s point of view, at a time of multiple changes in Saudi Arabia, where teachers’ views are not always taken into consideration. The research focus is on teachers’ perceptions of current EFL practices and the role they play in curriculum development and planning, and considers what barriers are hindering them from working towards student-centred and active inquiry-oriented learning environments. The data used to examine teachers’ perceptions and experiences of current English language teaching (ELT) practices are drawn from a sample of 12 female Saudi EFL teachers, who have been awarded international degrees and who are practising ELT in a university in Saudi Arabia. Data sources include semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, focus group discussions and a drawing activity. The findings revealed: (1) Overall, bureaucracy and a top down approach adopted by the higher education institution affects teachers’ perceptions and pedagogical quality; (2) Empowerment appears to be an essential, but not sufficient condition to achieve real changes and successful educational outcomes as it depends on teachers’ expertise and their own methods of instructional practice; (3) The need for more continuous professional development (CPD) programmes is an emergent aspect that requires further attention. Three significant issues were raised for further research and comment, relating to the mismatch between current policy aspirations for professional development and the reality of teachers’ experience. At the end of this thesis, implications for in-service training of teachers in a mono-cultural society such as Saudi Arabia were discussed.

This thesis recovers the wordbooks for Handel’s oratorios from their neglect in literary and musical history. Taking Joseph and his Brethren and Hercules as samples, it shows the essential place of wordbooks in the original oratorio experience and challenges an editorial and performance practice which favours music over words. Chapter One presents editions of the wordbooks of Joseph and Hercules in order to offer a transmissional history, and Chapter Two reclaims the literariness of the librettos and demonstrates their effectiveness. Chapter Three examines the two librettos in the composer’s and copyist’s manuscript musical scores prior to first publication of the wordbooks and reveals verbal changes made during composition of the music. Chapter Four explores the significance of wordbooks for the booksellers of Joseph and Hercules and reconstructs aspects of wordbook production and consumption. Chapter Five identifies the wordbooks’ printer and places wordbook production in the context of book trade regulation and copyright. Chapter Six discusses the material identity of the wordbooks and the design principles which supported their reception. The thesis concludes that access to printed librettos is essential to redress the verbal-musical imbalance in contemporary performances of Handel’s oratorios.

This thesis explores PhD-researcher oral presentations (OPs) in five studies on engagement and clarification strategies in a parallel corpus of 88 OP transcription-essay pairs (n=128228 tokens). Corpus and statistical significance procedures identify features that discriminate among researchers' levels of oral achievement and disciplines: gestural-verbal deixis, audience and impersonal identity projection, code glosses, and transformations of written into oral content. Features analyses include distribution across the levels and disciplines subcorpora, recurrent patterns, discourse functions, and pragmatic appropriacy and grammatical variety. The studies reveal that levels differ in the way that presenters mark stance authorship, anticipate the audience need for help, and vary their strategies grammatically. Disciplinary differences re-present the ways in which disciplines (re)produce knowledge. Hard-fields focus on research methods and outcomes is observed in interaction with images, academic identity projection, and technical terms explanation. Soft-field OPs focus on interpretations is observed in opinions towards existing knowledge and use of folk examples. Language choices also reflect the non-expert character of the audience. This thesis contributes to the study of oral academic genres by demonstrating the importance of multimodal, across modes, non-deficiency analyses; confirming disciplinary differences; and proposing ways of understanding levels of achievement based on pragmatic success rather than grammatical accuracy.

'Half' is a dual narrative following the stories of sisters Sadie and Hannah on a less than harmonious trip round the Western States of America, and Olive Oatman, a fourteen-year-old girl captured by Native Americans in 1851. Olive’s account of servitude and acculturation with the Mohave Indians is in fact the fictionalisation of a memoir, told through a journal Sadie acquires. While the modern narrative in 'Half' is also based extensively on biographical content, the resulting novel is most definitely fiction. The accompanying research explores the point at which memoir and fiction intersect, asking if there is ever absolute truth or absolute fiction when utilising one’s own experiences as a framework for a narrative. Using evidence from historians it examines the extent to which the key texts discussed in the Thesis, classified as Memoir or Fiction, can be seen to occupy the middle ground between both tropes. It also looks at how the novel 'Half' incorporates a complex range of personal experience and imaginative explorations through its key themes of otherness, sisterly relationships and the role of fathers – and how the two narrative strands dovetail in both obvious and unpredictable ways to express the dark subtext of the novel.

When bilinguals process words in one of their languages, the words in their other language are also activated. This activation can be due to shared conceptual representations or to direct cross- linguistic links between the words at the lexical level. The nature of the activation is affected by the bilingual profile of the speaker, with more proficient L2 speakers activating conceptual representations directly while less proficient speakers arc more dependent on lexical level links. The aim of my research is to investigate the role of bilingual profile in the lexical organization of Arabic-English bilinguals. Bilingual profile refers to relative status of the two languages, which can depend on a number of factors for example, language dominance, age of acquisition and proficiency. In this thesis I test the lexical processing of Arabic-English bilinguals in masked and visible priming of lexical decision to written words. Arabic and English have different scripts and also differ in their morphological structure making them ideal languages for testing lexical level cross-linguistic activation. I examine the effect bilingual profile on the effect of morphological and semantically related Arabic primes and targets and the effect of Arabic morphological and translation primes on the processing of English targets.

This thesis investigates the differences between live blogs and traditional online news articles, and differences in how readers evaluate them. Building on developments in reader response studies, news media studies, and studies of evaluative language, I analysed live blogs and traditional online news articles for their structure and use of evaluative language. I show how live blogs present news events as more temporally close to the reader than traditional online news articles and ascribe evaluations of the reported news events to news actors, while traditional online news articles present evaluations ofthe news events more often as objective. Additionally, I conducted twenty interviews in an experimental setting with live blog or traditional online news article readers. I used qualitative linguistic analysis to investigate evaluations of the news texts and evaluations of the news events following the Appraisal framework. This analysis showed that all readers implicitly evaluated news events following news values. It also showed that readers of live blogs were more likely than traditional online news article readers to evaluate news events as affective, ascribing these evaluations to the inclusion of social media, primarily Tweets, in the live blogs.

The study of metaphor is an interdisciplinary endeavor crossing such fields as cognitive linguistics, psychology, and creativity studies. Two important conclusions on the nature of metaphor have been drawn to date: (1) the ability to use metaphor is a normal human cognitive ability and widespread in language; (2) metaphor is not a unitary construct and varies greatly from the highly familiar and conventional to the creative. Viewing metaphor as lying along a continuum, this thesis narrows the concept of metaphoric competence to creative metaphoric competence, which looks at this ability from a creativity perspective. In this thesis, it is hypothesized that creative metaphoric competence is an underlying competency, which is related to a more general creative competence, and therefore is projected onto both the L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English). In order to test this hypothesis, data from creative metaphor production tasks were collected in both languages. In addition, a number of creativity measurements were also developed with the aim of measuring the multifaceted nature of creativity. Relationships between these variables were investigated. Findings suggest that creative metaphoric competence is an individual difference variable, which could be described as a disposition towards novelty and is related to other measurements of creativity.

This thesis consists of a critical study, ‘“A Noisy Situation”: The Feminine and Feminist New Absurd in Twenty-first Century British and American Poetry’, followed by a poetry collection, 'Send Shells'. The critical study is a guidebook to the New Absurd, and thereby informs the reading of 'Send Shells'. Chapter One introduces the New Absurd as a descendant of male-dominated Absurdism; feminine and feminist humour is explored through Sam Riviere, Heather Phillipson, Selima Hill and Luke Kennard. Chapters Two, Three and Four focus on individual poets: Jennifer L. Knox’s 'A Gingo Like Me', Emily Berry’s 'Dear Boy' and Caroline Bird’s 'The Hat-Stand' 'Union' and 'In These Days of Prohibition'. The following themes are investigated: culture, class, and elitism; reality and imagination; feminine humour and sadness. Chapter Five explores apocalypse and technology through Maxine Chernoff, Jane Yeh, and Anne Carson. Chapter Six analyses failures to communicate through Rebecca Perry, Crispin Best, Rachael Allen, and Sara Woods. In conclusion Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Mona Arshi and Anne Boyer are read to explore poets utilising the New Absurd, a prominent and influential movement in modern poetry, which does not have a specific membership, and might be seen as an aesthetic rather than a school.