The research focuses on stakeholder perceptions of the quality of undergraduate transnational higher education (TNHE) provision based on the context of a Vietnam-UK partnership offering two joint undergraduate programmes named BA in Business Management and BA in Banking and Finance. This is a research context that has previously received little attention. The thesis is underpinned by three research questions designed to explore issues related to the determinants of the quality, the effectiveness of the programme delivery and the factors that enable or conversely hinder the quality of the provision, with an emphasis on comparing the perceptions of students, university policy-makers and staff providers. These insights provide the basis of an understanding of the factors contributing to quality from a comparative and intercultural perspective. The methodology is based on a conceptual framework that combines the approach of defining quality in higher education as a stakeholder-specific meaning, the stakeholder theory to approach quality management, and the input-process-output model of quality management in higher education. The research applies a multiple-method approach, including interviews and questionnaires within a predominantly qualitative interpretive paradigm. The key findings fall within four categories. First is the importance of curricular equivalence and adaptation to tailor student learning needs. Second is the awareness of cultural differences to the approaches of transnational teaching and learning which focuses on a glocalised approach in a learning-centred environment. Third is the effective learning environment which focuses on providing value-added activities to enhance student learning opportunities and develop student employability. Fourth is building working relations by a means of effective communications and sharing practices in working with the partner institution. Overall, the findings are not generalizable in quantitative terms, but provide rich evidence (through an in-depth qualitative enquiry) of processes that promote, or conversely hinder, quality undergraduate provision in a TNHE partnership.

Translanguaging as an emerging theme in sociolinguistic studies refers to the meaning-making process by which people deploy various linguistic and semiotic resources at their disposal. This concept emphasises how personal history and experience are embedded in language practices, and thus enables researchers to understand how identities are rooted in and develop in contemporary contexts. Translanguaging in China is an under-researched area, and this study investigates the relationship between online translanguaging practices and Chinese teenagers' identity. The study is located in contemporary metropolitan China, where teenagers have more access to global communication networks than ever before, but where free expression and information exchange is progressively restricted. It aims to find out how Chinese teenagers understand their identities, and how this relates to their multilingual and multimodal online expression. Based on the understanding of their language and identity, the study also hopes to draw some implications for general pedagogy and language education. Based on recent translanguaging studies (Simpson and Bradley, 2017; Zhu and Li, 2017), I adopt a linguistic ethnographic approach that interprets social and cultural life through situated language use (Creese and Copland, 2015). I followed their social networking sites and recorded their posts over the course of a year, with an analytical focus on posts involving translanguaging, and I interviewed them about their self-identities in order to understand how their language practices and identities are interrelated. The findings reveal that the participants' are actively and critically developing their self-identities, regardless of geographical and cultural boundaries, or current political attempts to restrict their self-expression. The online translanguaging practices enable the teenagers to articulate their identities freely with the multimodal semiotic resources at their disposal, in a way they might not be able to do offline. I conclude that translanguaging is a valuable lens through which to understand Chinese teenagers' identity construction, and the study offers some implications both for future research on translanguaging, and for school English language pedagogy.

University public engagement has become a topic of renewed interest, and institutions are increasingly required to engage with communities in order to promote the impact of their research. This qualitative case study focuses on a Chilean public university developing a process of reappraisal of extensión, linkage with the context and communications, aimed to construct a form, indicators, rubric and definitions to include engagement as a criterion for academic and institutional assessment systems. The rationale for this study emanates from an interest in understanding the meaning and significance attached to public engagement at a Latin American public institution, and how these reflect on the role of the university in society. The research questions relate to the context of the reappraisal process, the way it was organised and developed, and the extent to which its outcomes satisfy the needs and expectations of stakeholders. Data collection methods included interviews, focus groups, observation and document analysis. Participants comprised academic and non-academic staff, students and community members, focusing on the group that led the reappraisal process and the case of three specific departments. The results show a perspective of public engagement grounded in a Latin American tradition of social purpose, where influencing public policy and contributing to the country's development is the main goal, and links with the civil society and the public sector are the most highly valued. A perspective of extensión as a way of preserving the university commitment to the public good and its character as a public institution was identified, contrasted by a relation with the community that was respectful, but tends not to consider it as a source of valuable knowledge. A framework of goals, partners and ways to engage was generated, which can be used by practitioners and researchers to plan or evaluate public engagement activities.

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Interest in children’s experiences of their local environment is growing in education studies, geography and environmental psychology in response to increasing interests in children’s everyday lives and personal geographies. Within international education research, those studies exploring experiences of international school education tend to explore senses of belonging, identity and notions of ‘home’. However, the direct and embodied relationship expatriate children have with their local environment, and experiences of place, is a neglected field of study. The geographical context of this research in a gated compound in Qatar is significant. A growing volume of research from a variety of disciplines, notably urban planning studies, cultural geography and anthropology have started to explore gated communities as a feature of living spaces across the world – often for wealthy nationals and expatriates in countries with more extreme inequalities in wealth distribution. However, research focusing on the experiences of (expatriate) children learning and growing up in such contexts is a limited. This research explores how children living in a gated expatriate enclave in Qatar experience their local environment. With the rise in the number of gated communities and the growth of expatriate enclaves globally, this is a significant area of research with potential implications for educators and communities beyond the case study area. The findings of this research suggest that boundedness and surveillance in the gated community impact interactions with and constructions of space and place, limiting free exploration of the wider environment, host country interaction, and creating binary constructions of insides / outsides and insiders / outsiders. The research suggests ways educators in similar contexts can adapt and adopt geographical theory such as ‘critical thirding’ to help children deconstruct physical, social and imagined boundaries in their local environment, and critically engage with and participate in place-making in their local area. Furthermore, the potential for the incorporation of place-based educational practices is examined.

This study explores the educational benefits of online dialogue as posited by the Garrison et al. (2001) Community of Inquiry framework. Specifically, that online discussion allows learners to collaboratively construct knowledge through critical discourse (i.e. ‘cognitive presence’), that results in deep and meaningful learning. A body of Community of Inquiry research has led to a critique of the framework, specifically that the higher levels of reflective thought are not occurring. This thesis investigates this potential flaw and the response that the problem is not the framework per se, but issues with ‘teaching presence’ or online course design and facilitation. To investigate these research questions, two groups of in-service English language teachers studied identical course content with differing discussion forum task types. Group A tasks included debate and case study based tasks while Group B used more typical open discussion type tasks. The resulting transcripts were coded as per the analytical framework of Park (2009). Overall, Group A transcripts showed increased incidence of the higher phases of ‘cognitive presence’ when compared with Group B. There was evidence, particularly in the debate format, that changing the task design impacts the shape and substance of the discussion, providing more opportunity for deeper critical thought. Still, ‘lower level’ exploratory thought was dominant e.g. the teachers engaged in ‘Personal narration’ (i.e. stories about learners or classroom practice) for 47.1% of the total cognitive presence incidence in Group B and 17.5% in Group A. This was not proportionate to the number of prompts requesting the teachers to engage in this. Given the frequency with which the latter occurred, future research is required to understand if this is a recurrent and distinctive feature of in-service teachers online discussion and to better understand the function and value of these ‘stories’.

This study investigates the process of the emergence of authentic language use in collaborative activities within computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environments. Despite technology being widely incorporated in English language programmes in higher education institutions in Oman, language study in a CALL context is under-researched in the Omani context. The educational reforms and strategic plans in Oman have always targeted wider incorporation of technology as well as developing English language teaching and learning despite the lack of studies that investigate and explore the ways in which the two might relate in the Omani context. From the joint, and novel, perspectives of Complexity Theory and the Noticing Hypothesis, this study investigates the emergence of authentic language use in collaborative CALL environments and the ways in which this process of emergence relates to collaboration. To achieve this, the study adopts the perspective of Complexity Theory where language development is argued to be emergent, nonlinear, based on the here-and-now context and in constant flux. The study also draws on the Noticing Hypothesis in relation to how and why learners attend to specific features of language in a CALL environment. The study followed a qualitative enquiry design. Data were drawn from twelve groups of three to four learners within three English language classes from a foundation programme in one Omani college. In the course of one semester, two language learning lessons from each class were observed. After each observed lesson, two groups of learners were selected to participate in stimulated recall interviews. The findings indicated that the language emergence process in collaborative CALL environments is triggered by a process of signalling relevance (perceiving a link between Web-based cues and the learners’ goal in a class activity) followed by an action (e.g., a discussion or rereading of the text) and finally the act of evaluating that information as to whether or not it is relevant to the learners’ goals in the activity. The process was also found to be influenced by the participants’ interaction with the multimodal components in the collaborative CALL environment. The findings also indicated that, while carrying out their activities, the participants employed a number of specific strategies that influenced the way in which they attended to particular language, selected information and achieved their goals. The study concludes by identifying a range of recommendations derived from the findings for facilitating the occurrence of authentic language use in a collaborative CALL environment.

Exploring teachers' language practices has become ubiquitous in linguistics research in an attempt to unveil what actually transpires in foreign language classes. One focus on language practices has been to study teachers' code-switching (CS) practices, the alternating from one language to another, which has been researched from a variety of standpoints. These include the amount of CS and the functions for which CS is utilised. Nevertheless, few take into account the possible impact of the teachers' background (e.g. education, biographies, lifestyles) on teachers' CS. Taking teachers' backgrounds into consideration, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the in-class CS beliefs and practices of non-native, Turkish-Cypriot, and Turkish, English language teachers working together in the north of Cyprus. It was deemed significant to investigate the CS beliefs and practices of both Turkish-Cypriot and Turkish teachers in that there has been an increased influx of Turkish teachers and students, as well as international students, (mainly from the Middle East and Africa) in the north of Cyprus due to the foundation of branches of Turkish universities there. The teaching of English was chosen due to its significance both for Turkish-Cypriot and Turkish heritage students. The study incorporates instances from the data in the form of classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups. The results showed that teachers' CS practice may, to a certain extent, differ culturally owing to teachers' cultures of learning. This study adds to the discussion surrounding the necessity for CS studies to consider the role teachers' cultures of learning might play in determining issues such as the amount of or functions for CS in the classroom. The study concludes with recommendations for CS, professional development and for Turkish universities in the north of Cyprus, in order to suggest ways to involve teachers in the planning process and hence to improve the quality of foreign language learning.