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1.1 : This Chapter considers the need for an appropriate syllabus and materials for the teaching of English for Special Purposes (E. S. P. ) to overseas students in tertiary education in Britain. It stresses the need for preliminary investigation of native speakers' use of English for special purposes and considers the advantages of conducting such an enquiry in an academic setting. It describes a specific instance of the needs of a group of students in a British university, and discusses the conclusions that were drawn from a preliminary study of the group. It explains the connection between the preliminary study and the present enquiry, and describes the gathering of suitable data in the form of recorded lectures and related research papers. 1.1.1 : E. S. P. in Higher Education This enquiry stems from a longstanding concern with the difficulties faced by speakers of English as a second or foreign language who require English in order to engage in academic or professional activities. This involves the use of English for a set of special communicative purposes which the specialist must accomplish under a range of different circumstances of communication. The purposes and circumstances with which I am most familiar are those of foreign students studying for a first or higher degree in institutions where English is the medium of instruction. But a personal interest in the use of English for academic purposes is not the only reason for basing the enquiry on this particular field.

Nurturing teacher and learner autonomy is a prerequisite to foreign language development within institutionalised settings. This necessitates a process whereby teachers themselves become authors of their own pedagogical practice to experience and nourish their autonomy, critically reflecting on and flexibly managing processes that challenge and enable learners to develop competences as language learners and language users. The study portrays the notion of teacher and learner autonomy as two sides of the same coin, illustrating a process that enabled three teachers of German as a foreign language to inquire into the fostering of learner autonomy in secondary schools in Malta. Through a process grounded within a collaborative and inquiry-oriented approach, enacted through meetings and discussions with teachers, and the teacher inquiry with their learners in class, the study created the conditions that sought to help teachers to navigate through and gain insight into the process of fostering learner autonomy. The aims of the study, embedded within the two aforementioned processes, led teachers to problematise areas within their practice in relation to the development of learner autonomy in language learning and language use and looked into internal and external constraints and possibilities within this process. It furthermore analysed benefits that emerged from practice in this regard. Implications of this study call for the integration of inquiry-oriented processes in the foreign language classroom sustained by the collaborative space that fostered the conditions for inquiry through teachers’ own lens of pedagogy for autonomy. It illustrates how a process of teacher inquiry and reflective practice bring together the voices of all participants involved in the study; teacher, learner and myself as researcher, to work towards the vision of fostering autonomy in foreign language teaching and learning. The study furthermore serves to portray illustrations of practice to provide insight into the underlying factors and various facets of such a process within the Maltese context.

Over the last few decades, motivation has become recognized as crucial in language learning success. Researchers have conducted numerous of studies which have sought to explain why people select, perform, and continue to learn a language. The results and findings of these studies allow us a greater understanding of second language (L2) learning motivation. However, one area of language learning motivation research that has not received as much attention is the temporal aspect of motivational fluctuations. In recent years, there have been calls for a more widespread adoption of qualitative research methods to investigate what Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011) describe as the dynamic processes of a learner’s’ motivational development. This thesis is a response to those calls. This thesis attempts to discover perceptions of language learning motivation. In particular, the research reported in this thesis is an attempt to develop a greater understanding of temporal motivational fluctuations of Japanese university L2 learners. As such, the overall aim of this longitudinal qualitative study is to explore the temporal progression of the motivational thinking of three different age groups of Japanese university learners. More specifically, this research sheds light on the motivations of L2 learners in a medium-sized university in Japan, discovers similarities and differences in language learning motivation between different age groups of university learners, and determines how their language learning motivation fluctuates over the period of an academic year. The tools of inquiry used in this qualitative research project were interviews and diaries. Three sets of interviews were conducted with 23 learners in a Japanese university over the course of an academic year. Seven of the participants were freshmen students and seven were in their second year. The remaining nine were in the third grade. Participants completed and submitted a total of seven diary entries at regular intervals throughout the study and these were used to inform the second and third rounds of interviews. The overall findings showed that the learners in each grade were influenced by both their sociohistorical and cultural context and their values and goals at the start of the study. During the middle of the academic year, these goals and values were placed on hold as their immediate context seemed to have more motivational influence. Towards the end of the study the values and goals returned to play a more prominent role in their language learning motivation. There were also several subtle differences in the motivation of the three age groups and this could be seen most clearly in the educational context where institutional pressures were stronger for the older students in the study.

The effectiveness of teacher written feedback has been a subject of debate in second language writing for decades. The most basic debate in this area among ESL writing researchers is whether teacher written feedback in various forms has any positive effects on student writing revisions. Among other researchers, Ferris, Lee, Ene & Upton and Stevenson & Phakiti argued that while the effectiveness of error feedback in the traditional paper-and-pen form (Ferris, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and Lee, 2008a, 2008b), computer-facilitated form (Ene & Upton, 2014) or computer-generated form (Stevenson & Phakiti, 2013) was not conclusive, more research should be done to explore in what ways error feedback can be improved. Indeed, the heterogeneity of these studies characterized by different focus, research designs, institutional and instructional contexts, and participant backgrounds, alongside some methodological flaws and misinterpretation of findings identified in my critical review has possibly undermined the validity and reliability of the studies, giving rise to these mixed results for both paper-and-pen feedback and computer-based feedback. As such, the causality between different forms of feedback treatment and their outcomes of error reduction is questioned. With the primary interest in improving the effectiveness of teacher written feedback in error correction, ‘Mark My Words’ (‘MMWs’), the interactive-based electronic feedback system, was designed in such a way to accommodate individual learners’ language needs and to be more responsive to various error types. This study focused on examining on the effectiveness of ‘Mark My Words’ (‘MMWs’), as a kind of computer-facilitated feedback (i.e. electronic feedback), in improving students’ error reduction in their writing revisions, under a controlled condition. The mixed methods approach was adopted, namely the ‘error count’ method and ‘questionnaire’, in this study. The participants were 62 second-year engineering students enrolled in an English for Specific Purposes course in a Hong Kong University. Efforts were made to avoid the impact of extraneous variables on the validity and reliability of the research outcomes under such controlled condition. The positive results of this study can contribute some sort of concrete evidence to the growing body of literature of the ‘effectiveness of teacher written feedback’ and ‘second language writing’, thus clarifying some mixed results of the previous research.

This investigation joins the increasing body of research on initial teacher education arguing that preservice teacher (PST) learning and identity construction are intertwined and are crucial to professional development. Guided by Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop's (2004) theoretical framework for investigating teacher professional identities, the focus of this study is to examine from a socio-constructivist perspective 1) how experiences in the practicum influence early professional identity construction; 2) how personal factors influence early identity construction; and 3) how reflective practice in the practicum influences PST professional identity development. To this end, I ask preservice teacher participants to reflect upon the challenges which they face during the practicum component of their second language teacher education (SLTE) programme and how their experiences have shaped their notions of professional identity, while paying particular attention to agency within resource poor environments. Specifically, this study examines the various problems confronting PSTs which include the impact of social, institutional and personal obstacles on the construction of participants’ professional identity. A group of ten Mexican PSTs in the eighth semester of their nine semester SLTE programme were research participants. This qualitative interpretative case study employed written reflections, asynchronous discussion forum transcripts, critical incidents, individual face to face interviews and a focus group session as methods of data collection. Data is analysed through sociocultural theory, positioning theory and interpretive discourse analysis employing Fairclough's (2003) discourse analysis model. Results revealed that multiple factors affected PSTs’ identity. These include participants’ past world experiences, practicum experiences and connections with colleagues and learners within communities of practice, knowledge of subject matter, teaching pedagogy, classroom management, and dealing with challenges in resource poor environments. The findings of this study contribute to the formulation of global knowledge and theory about language teachers’ learning which may benefit policy, theory and practice in the field of initial teacher education.

Summarization is an activity which language students are frequently called upon to perform, often without any explicit guidance. In a wider sense, it might be said that all learning, whether of language or anything else, involves the ability to distinguish what is important from what is not, and to incorporate it into existing schematic knowledge. In this respect, summarization can be seen as central to education in general as well as language education in particular. This thesis is an attempt to gain insights into the essential criteria for summarization. After the first chapter has outlined the scope and methodology of the enquiry, chapters 2 to 5 review a number of models of text analysis and discourse processing which, on the face of it, promise to provide a systematic basis for the identification of "main ideas" in written texts. It reviews a number of models of text analysis and discourse processing which, on the face of it, promise to provide a systematic basis for the identification of "main ideas" in written texts. These include the analysis of thematic structure associated with the work of Halliday and the Prague School, the Macrostructures proposed by van Dijk and Kintsch, and Meyer's studies of rhetorical structure. A critical investigation of these models leads to a consideration of a very different approach which focuses not on the text itself as product but on the reader's reaction to it in the process of interpretation. This emerges from the empirical analysis of student summaries and accounts in chapter 6, and is further discussed in the last chapter. In general, the thesis considers the theoretical validity of these different approaches to text description and their practical utility as points of reference for summarization. It surveys applied work based on them, relates them empirically to the analysis of summaries and accounts elicited from advanced Austrian students of English at university level, and works its way towards a set of principles and procedures which might be made operational in language pedagogy.

The thesis examines the concept of critical language awareness both in principle and practice. It begins with an exploration of the key principles which inform CLA and concludes with an account of a particular study of a foreign language classroom. CL~ as presented in the thesis, is seen as an essentially practical, classroom based enterprise which is indebted in various ways to particular understandings about the nature of texts and interpretative processes. Early chapters locate CLA within studies of text and discourse, the reading process and classroom interaction respectively. The first chapter presents the view that CLA takes its theoretical bearings largely from critical discourse analysis. Discussion centres around major points of departure between critical and conventional kinds of discourse analysis. Chapter two focuses on the role of the reader in text analysis, arguing for the need to locate critical reading within the wider concept of critical literacy. Chapter three proposes the need to develop a model of critical pedagogy which has the potential to enhance awareness of texts and readings within the context of the classroom community. Chapter four offers a bridge between the conceptual underpinnings of the study and the subsequent chapters which present the empirical part of the thesis. It describes the research methodology which informs the classroom study. Chapters five, six and seven respectively, provide an account of the rationale for the particular course at the centre of the study, in terms of the texts and classroom procedures which were selected; they also present an analysis of key features of selected classroom episodes. Chapter eight assesses the students' own views about the manner in which their critical judgements of texts and practices have evolved during the CLA course. The thesis concludes by drawing some lessons for future explorations of both the principles and practice of critical language awareness.

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