In recent decades, a widespread and deeply-rooted bias against ‘non-native speaker’ teachers which exists in English Language Teaching (ELT) has been documented. This prejudice together with the discourses that support and normalise it has been recently described as the ideology of native speakerism. This study examines the presence and the effects of native speakerism on ELT in Poland. It also aims to provide suggestions how the ELT profession can move forward beyond the ideology of native speakerism, towards an English as a Lingua Franca perspective on teaching English. More specifically, a mixed methods research design was used to answer five research questions; namely, (1) how students, teachers and recruiters in private Polish language schools understand the concept of a ‘native speaker’, (2) to what extent they prefer ‘native speaker’ teachers and (3) what the possible reasons for such preference might be, (4) what skills and qualities the three cohorts value highly in effective English teachers, and (5) how important is the teacher’s ‘nativeness’ in comparison. Focus groups, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to gather data on these research questions. Results show that native speakerism is still deeply embedded in ELT in Poland with many participants preferring ‘native speaker’ teachers. Nevertheless, the findings also indicate that the participants are aware of the global nature of English and that they do not see ‘native speakers’ as the only correct models of the English language. In addition, the teacher’s ‘nativeness’ seems to be the least important quality of an effective English teacher according to the three cohorts. Several practical implications of these results for classroom practice, materials writing and teacher training are suggested.

This study was conducted to explore the classroom assessment practices, specifically the forms of assessment and methods of providing feedback used by the teachers of English in lower level of secondary schools in Rwanda. It also aimed to investigate the students’ perceptions of the teachers’ assessment practices, the students’ self-efficacy for the four English language skills and how such self-efficacy was related to the teachers’ assessment practices. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to collect and analyse data from both teachers and students. The results indicated that controlled assessment, commonly known as paper and pencil was the most prevalent form that teachers used for assessment. The results also showed that the students reported relatively high positive perceptions for their teachers' classroom assessment practices and high self-efficacy in all the four English language skills except for listening. The Spearman correlation analysis indicated that the use of some performance assessment correlated with higher levels of students’ self-efficacy for productive skills. These results tend to support findings from previous studies that some assessment practices can affect the students’ self-efficacy. They expand the literature and deepen our understanding of the teachers’ assessment preferences in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context and highlight the complexity of the influencing factors of the students' self efficacy. Major implications of the findings are discussed.

The aim was to explore my own professional experiences in the role of a special school teacher; a role which I had recently moved to after 16 years teaching in mainstream education. The purposes framed this study: 1. To gain an insight and in-depth understanding of the role of the special school teacher. 2. To examine the influences of teacher identity, personal morality, autonomy and power, upon the role through autobiography. Using Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry methodology, data sources included field texts, reflective journal and other salient material. Deep and ongoing reflection using the three-dimensional inquiry space and narrative thinking played a significant part of ensuring the rigour of the study. Results indicate that there is a significant impact upon the role of the teacher due to a lack of specialist training, which impacted upon power and leadership roles within the relationships across teaching teams. Teacher identity, beliefs and personal morality appeared to have an influence upon professional decisions. Generous autonomy and lack of direct accountability appeared to be a significant factor in providing opportunity for a cultural acceptance of poor standards by a small minority of staff. My personal histories were seen to have a significant impact upon my present values and attitudes and had a significant impact upon the shaping of my teacher identity. This narrative inquiry assists in understanding the role of the special needs teacher at a time of profound interest in SEN. It supports understanding the complexities of teacher identity during a time of significant role change and how this affects the teaching role. This study supports a deeper understanding of factors such as morality, power and autonomy and their interconnectedness with relationships in special education.

The impact of teachers’ beliefs on effective curriculum change implementation is widely recognised. This study identifies the factors affecting the change process; developing and presenting a theoretical model of the process of curriculum change precipitated by disciplinary shift as perceived by the teachers experiencing the transformation. It was carried out in the context of, arguably the most significant disciplinary shift in the last two decades of the English National Curriculum: the movement from ICT to Computing. The research was founded on the views, beliefs and experiences of existing ICT teachers as they ‘lived through’ the planning and implementation of the new curriculum. The research followed an inductive interpretive approach to expose a theoretical model grounded in this data. This grounded research methodology is original in both its emphasis and context. The model that emerges identifies that teachers’ beliefs act to form their enacted support of the new curriculum that manifested itself in a number of ways. The teachers’ beliefs that drive their enacted support form a complex interrelationship that involves’ their beliefs, regarding the nature of IT education and student ability; their perceptions of how the curriculum change would personally affect them and their stated support of the new curriculum. Each of these aspects has a number of intervening influences meaning that for each individual teacher there were both positive and negative forces acting on each. As the emergent model identifies how teachers respond to curriculum change the conclusions of this research have consequences for both teachers, and school leaders and policy makers. Additionally, in presenting existing ICT teachers’ beliefs regarding IT education, and how these were formed through their biographies and how they have influenced said teachers’ responses to the new curriculum this study establishes new knowledge and understanding of subject specialist teachers and their beliefs, in both ICT and other disciplinary areas.

Background: The case study school (CS School) a specialised secondary school that has small class sizes of 20 students, selected teaching staff and a curriculum with 40% devoted to character education and 60% to literacy-numeracy and vocational subjects. Aim: To what extent are cognitive behavioural changes used to negotiate environmental demands for academic engagement after three to four years of CS School schooling. Samples: 152 enrolled freshmen (at entry-point) and 134 graduating students (at exit-point); 11 class teachers from each student cohort (n=22). Method: Using a predominantly quantitative approach, students answered the MES-HS instrument that measured the motivation and engagement factors, and Academic Buoyancy questionnaire that measured daily academic coping. Class teachers answered the Teachers’ perceptions of student motivation and engagement and Teachers’ enjoyment of teaching questionnaires. Data from students’ and teachers’ surveys were correlated with graduating students’ Youth EQi: YVTM scale scores (exit-point & entry-point data). Results: No significant difference between freshmen versus graduating students on motivation and engagement factors and academic coping scale. Class teachers indicated that their graduating students were significantly more self-efficacious than class teachers of freshmen. The boys coped significantly better than girls. Students with repeated failure at a high-stakes examination were significantly more stressed and scored significantly lower on EQi adaptability and general mood scales than students who failed the examination once. EQi scale item of stress management was correlated positively to mastery orientation at learning and negatively to uncertainty control, self-handicapping and disengagement; intrapersonal scale was reciprocally correlated to uncertainty control; adaptability, general mood and interpersonal scales were positively correlated to self-belief, valuing school, mastery orientation and time/task management. Students’ mastery orientation at learning, persistence and avoiding failure scores were correlated with teachers’ enjoyment of teaching. Subtle layers of differentiated motivation and engagement scores contextualised by the different ethnic groups were noted. Conclusion: Students’ success at controlling stress correlated with EQi adaptability, general mood and interpersonal scales that were associated with self-efficacy, valuing school, mastery orientation in learning focus and time management. A model of motivating the less academically inclined students to being engaged with schooling following a temporal learning process of sustained stress control and classroom engagement is proposed.

This study examines Islamic studies teachers’ perception of the effectiveness of using a blended learning approach in teaching Islamic education modules in girls’ primary schools. Furthermore, it investigates participants’ perspectives on whether a blended approach is suitable for teaching all Islamic education modules or if only traditional methods are ideal for teaching some of them. A mixed-methods approach was used for data collection in this study, including qualitative (lesson observations and interviews) and quantitative (online questionnaires) methods. In the data analysis phase, both a thematic analysis and a descriptive statistics analysis including factor analysis using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was employed to facilitate the interpretation of quantitative data. The blended approach was thought to be suitable to use in teaching all subjects of the Islamic education curriculum. However, the frequency of using such method depends on the content of the lesson and the subject that teachers want it to teach. Moreover, Islamic studies teachers believed that using a blended learning approach increased their productivity when preparing for their lessons and they believed that such methods helped them to achieve curriculum objectives. On the other hand, as a result of applying a blended approach teachers may face difficulty in completing the given unit in one lesson and teachers may experience difficulty in retaking control of the class, particularly after applying one of the active learning strategies. Also, using too many examples of active learning strategies may distract students. The study also revealed that the key factors which may encourage Islamic studies teachers to use a blended approach include the nature of the curriculum and teachers’ desire and hope of achieving curriculum objectives and the availability of the teaching aids related to each unit in a student’s textbook. Teacher workload, a lack of effective training and a lack of information and communication technology (ICT) tools together with Islamic studies teachers’ fear of undermining the respected status of the academic content were thought to be some of the key obstacles that may prohibit Islamic studies teachers from applying a blended learning approach. This study provides Islamic studies teachers with a blended learning model, along with identification of some of its benefits to both teachers and students. Finally, the blended learning model may be considered a contribution to research in pedagogy, and future researchers may further develop or evaluate the effectiveness of the blended learning model for use in teaching other subjects.

This thesis explores depictions of the human body in German Expressionist art and the ways in which they might be interpreted through Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It is inspired by Franz Marc’s claim that, in Schopenhauer’s terms, the world as will took precedence over the world as representation in his own day. Discussion begins with an assessment of Vasily Kandinsky’s development of abstract art in relation to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the world as representation. Here attention is given to Kandinsky’s personal reading of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of vision and colour. Chapter 2 explores depictions of dance in Expressionism, where the body is considered to be an objectification of the will. Discussion is negotiated through a case study of the work of Emil Nolde. In addition to the body in movement, the theme of the naked body was also central to Expressionist ideology and practice. Hence, Chapter 3 engages in an interpretation of Expressionist depictions of the naked body according to Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Platonic ideas and the world as representation. The outbreak of war in 1914 presented the Expressionist generation with new challenges. Chapter 4, therefore, examines the military experiences of selected Expressionist artists in order to assess their affirmation or denial of the will to war. The final chapters of the thesis reflect upon the relationship between Expressionism and the emergent Nazi regime in the 1930s. Chapter 5 takes as its theme an exploration of ‘degenerate art’ and ‘degenerate’ bodies in relation to the artist Otto Mueller and his depiction of gypsies, according to Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy. Finally, Chapter 6 investigates Emil Nolde’s association with Nazism and offers a new interpretation of these associations according to Schopenhauer’s doctrine of free will. In conclusion, the thesis demonstrates that Marc’s claims were broadly valid throughout this period but not without exception.

This thesis investigates how asylum applicants and refugees in the UK, and legal professionals, communicate multilingually and interculturally within legal advice meetings concerning the processes of applying for asylum and for refugee family reunion. The thesis addresses the important question of how English-speaking immigration legal advisors negotiate understanding with clients from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds in order to deliver crucial legal advice and support. Adopting a critical social constructionist perspective on language, culture, and communication, the thesis explores how a diverse range of linguistic, languacultural and discursive resources are employed to communicate within legal advice-giving. The thesis offers an in-depth analysis of legal-lay communication in the co-operative professional mediation setting of legal advice, contrasting with, and complementing, the existing literature on multilingual and intercultural communication in institutional gatekeeping contexts. The research takes a linguistic ethnographic case study approach, applying methodological perspectives on researching multilingually and theoretical perspectives from institutional ethnography. It combines ethnographic fieldwork within an advice service offering asylum and refugee legal advice with linguistic analysis of observations and audio recordings of advice meeting interactions. The linguistic analysis combines the micro-analytic tools of interactional sociolinguistics with a communicative activity type analysis of the discursive structuring of legal advice interactions, and a transcontextual analysis of the range of texts entering into the interaction. The thesis demonstrates how refugee and asylum legal advice interactions are contextually framed by legal institutional intertextual hierarchies, which constrain, but also provide resources for, the purposeful communication taking place. It also demonstrates how a flexibly applied communicative activity type structure functions as a discursive tool to support intercultural communication. The thesis contributes to the fields of intercultural communication studies and professional and legal communication studies, and responds to broader issues of language and social justice, and the linguistic accessibility of institutions.

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