This thesis investigates the way English L2 learners of Spanish communicate face-to-face with other learners (NNS), and native speakers (NS) by means of communication strategies (CSs). The final aim is to examine the learners’ strategic use of the target language as influenced by three variables: the proficiency level, the type of task and the type of dyad. Learners with different proficiency levels interacted face-to-face when carrying out two types of tasks. 36 interactions with different combinations of dyad and task were elicited by means of video and audio recording, observation of participants’ interactions and stimulated recall methodology. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to investigate possible associations between CSs and tasks, dyads and proficiency levels in each setting. The major findings in this study indicate a higher use of CSs in beginner levels, which was reflected in the lower level learners’ concern for solving lexis-related problems, and their tendency to focus on less complex grammatical features of the language. The higher level learners, however, seemed to focus more on grammar-related problems, as well as on more complex aspects of the target language. A similar lexis-grammar distinction was observed for the task variable. The open task, a free-conversation activity, involved higher cognitive demands due to the lack of visual support and the linguistic freedom provided by the topics given. This pushed the learners to invest more in the conversation, by attempting to produce more L2 and more conceptually complex ideas, thus making it a more grammar-oriented activity. Conversely, the closed task, a jigsaw activity, resulted in a more linguistically demanding task due to its linguistic restrictions, through the visual context provided, posing more lexis-related problems. Finally, the NNS-NS’s non-shared status was the major influence on the learners’ CSs. The NS – through their linguistic expertise – did not only assist and guide the learners, when this help was elicited through the learners’ CSs, but also triggered comprehension problems because of their more complex speech. The NNSs’ similar status, on the other hand, although also triggered the learners’ appeal for help – albeit to a lesser extent – the interlocutor was less likely to provide the assistance required, and just acknowledged their peer’s message to avoid a communication breakdown and maintain the conversation. It seemed that the learners do not expect this assistance as much as when interacting with a NS, as they are aware of their mutual lack of L2 resources, and because their shared characteristics also promote a mutual, implicit understanding between them.

The present research, drawing upon Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, investigated the deployment of interpersonal meanings in discussion sections of doctoral theses produced by both First Language (hereafter L1) Chinese and L1 English speakers from the Centre of Applied Linguistics (hereafter CAL) at the University of Warwick. This study adopted a corpus-based approach to examining the choices of Appraisal options made by L1 Chinese and L1 English writers. It also explored the patterns of discussing the authors’ own research findings in relation to previous literature by means of Appraisal options or co-articulations of options, which is considered as a key aspect of the rhetorical purpose of discussion sections. The statistical tests of this study showed that no significant difference was found in the use of Appraisal options between the L1C and L1E sub-corpora. This finding indicates a similar command of these interpersonal resources by both sets of writers and suggests that L1 may not be a constraint for English as second language (hereafter L2) writers on using interpersonal resources at the doctoral level. The qualitative analysis identified different preferences for co-articulating with the three main Appraisal options that the authors adopted to engage with the literature while discussing their findings. It also identified the congruent and non-congruent linguistic realizations of the two main Appraisal options that the authors used to present their claims about findings. Part of the qualitative results was shared with Masters students at CAL for the purpose of raising their awareness of the use of interpersonal language through exploration of extracts from corpus data.

The changing nature of English Language teaching in today’s world, driven by the forces of Globalisation, prompts a number of questions about the roles and identities of English language teachers. Previously acceptable dichotomies, notably ‘native/non-native speaker’ and ‘Centre/Periphery’ are consequently being challenged in studies of who teaches English, where they teach it and what they teach. I embarked on the current study because I felt that the ‘native/non-native’ dichotomy did not adequately describe the knowledge and skills of English teachers I had worked with worldwide. I developed a qualitative interpretative approach, as befitted the interpersonal nature of the study, and gathered data by recording conversations with fifteen participants from seven countries about their experiences of learning, using and teaching English in their contexts. The rich content they provided enabled me to delve below the oft-quoted dichotomies and uncover qualities rarely acknowledged in multilingual teachers. The most important features identified in the study concern the diminished importance of the ‘native speaker’ and the concomitant growth in the confidence of the multilingual teacher. My data reveals that this confidence has been acquired through depth of linguistic knowledge, through observance of other cultures, and through resistance to the encroachment of English by finding a place for the language which satisfies the needs of multilingual users without requiring subservience. In discovering these strengths of multilingual teachers, my exploration of their contexts demonstrates the importance of stepping outside the boundaries of one’s own limited environment and appreciating the range and depth of knowledge which individual English teachers are able to draw on to take ownership of their professionalism.

This study emerges from an interest in the shortcomings in the production of grammatically accurate sentences by university students of English as a Foreign Language in Taiwan. Informed by second language acquisition theory, it is a quasi-experimental investigation of the effects of explicit grammatical instruction on university students ’ EFL learning. Following the application of a pre-test the experimental group experienced explicit form-focused instruction in a communicative language teaching classroom for two semesters, receiving enhanced written input and undertaking linguistic consciousness-raising task, while the control group received no explicit grammatical instruction. Data were collected from recognition and written production tasks and students were interviewed on their linguistic performance to provide methodological triangulation. The statistical tools of Paired and Independent T-test, Chi-square, and Pearson’s Correlation were used to determine whether there were significant inter- and intra-group differences based on the different classroom experience. The major findings of this study were that explicit grammatical instruction raised students’ level of awareness of targeted forms significantly as they processed linguistic input and that subsequently their accurate production of these forms was enhanced. Differences in significance levels were discussed in the light of current debate on Second Language Acquisition with particular reference to the accessibility of Universal Grammar and the iv Minimalist framework. The results of this research indicate that a combination of focus on form and meaning is to be recommended within the content-based curriculum in Taiwanese university classrooms and the thesis ends with pedagogical implications for the application of explicit form-focused instruction in EFL learning.

Although second language spoken fluency has long been recognized as a major component of language proficiency, it has never been clearly defined. It has been shown that fluency is a complex phenomenon, with a host of relevant factors, and it has been suggested that it might be better separated into multiple concepts, such as cognitive fluency and utterance fluency. There is also evidence that fluency has a dialogic aspect, that is, that the fluency of a conversation is a co-construction of the two speakers, rather than simply alternating monologues. This can be observed in the confluence created by smooth turn exchanges, which results in minimizing gaps and avoiding overlap. The present study seeks to examine the co-construction of dialogic fluency through a parallel case study of two Japanese learners of English. One learner was of lower-intermediate proficiency, and the other was of higher proficiency, but both were able to create good impressions of fluency in conversations with native speakers of English. The case study design was semi-experimental in that it involved a story-retelling task done in monologue and dialogue, which was repeated to take into account the effect of practice. The case study allowed the close examination of the construction of fluency in the story-retelling task moment-by-moment through the course of the retellings, taking into account all relevant factors. The semi-experimental, parallel case study design allowed the findings to be compared (1) between monologue (where the learner recorded herself telling the story alone) and dialogue (where the learner told the story to a native speaker interlocutor), and (2) between the two learners of differing proficiency. This study was also mixed-methods in that it combined a qualitative, grounded theory approach to data analysis involving discourse analytic techniques, with quantitative comparisons of temporal variables of fluency. It was also multi-modal in that video was employed to take into account gaze, gesture, and head nods. Results of quantitative analyses revealed that the dialogues were comparatively more fluent than the monologues in terms of speech rate, articulation rate, and length of silences, for both speakers, although the higher-proficiency subject had faster speech and articulation rates than the lower-proficiency learner. This implies that narrative in dialogue is not just a listener occasionally backchanneling while the speaker delivers a monologue. The qualitative analyses revealed that the co-construction of smooth conversation was facilitated by the alignment of rhythm between the speaker and listener, supported by gaze, gestures, and head nods. The learners in these case studies were able to employ different fluency techniques for stressing words in phrases to create rhythm in spite of lower speech rates, and were able to adjust those techniques to maintain rhythm with even lower speech rates at difficult points of the story. These results confirm previous research that some apparent “dysfluencies” in speech should be considered as speech management phenomena, that positively contribute to the co-construction of fluent conversation. They also suggest that alignment between the speakers in terms of rhythm of speech and gaze are important in conversation, confirming previous research showing alignment at these and other levels of interaction. Finally, it appears that fluency is a multi-level construct, and that dialogic fluency should be considered a separate construct from cognitive fluency, of equal or more importance. This has implications for language testing, such that fluency may not be able to be captured with single test types, and for language teaching and learning more generally.

The aim of this study is to supplement existing research on phraseology in learner language by exploring the behaviours of phrasal verbs, a notorious hurdle for learners of English. This thesis compares a Chinese learner corpus (CLEC) with an English native speakers’ corpus (LOCNESS), with a reference corpus, the Bank of English (BoE), being consulted where necessary. A series of quantitative and qualitative investigations are conducted on phrasal verbs: calculation of frequency distribution and type-token ratios; identification of phraseological information, including collocation, semantic preference, semantic sequence and prosody. The results are discussed in full. Additionally, a framework utilising degrees of idiomaticity and restriction strength to group phrasal verbs is proposed and the issue of distinguishing synonymous counterparts is tackled as well. The results generally indicate that Chinese learner language tends to have more phrasal verb tokens but fewer types than written native speaker English does. Detailed case studies of phrasal verbs show, however, that the phraseological behaviours of phrasal verbs as used by learners are so individualised that the findings are mixed. Learner uses are characterised by idiosyncrasies of different phraseological units, suggesting that the links (between lexis and lexis, or lexis and concepts) in the lexicon of L2 are different from those in L1.

This study explored the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge of 13 second language (L2) English grammar points and the relationship of each type of knowledge with language learning aptitude and working memory capacity in 90 Mexican learners of L2 English at three different levels of proficiency (Level 5, Level 7, Level 9). An elicited imitation test and an oral narrative test were used to measure implicit knowledge, and a metalinguistic knowledge test was used to measure explicit knowledge. With respect to language learning aptitude and working memory, the former was operationalised by the LLAMA test, and the latter by the backward digit span test. With regard to the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge, implicit knowledge correlated positively and weakly with explicit knowledge while an analysis by grammar point showed a non-significant negative correlation approaching significance between implicit and explicit scores. These results indicate that learners found some grammar points easy in terms of explicit knowledge and other grammar points easy in terms of implicit knowledge, and vice versa. Learners’ language aptitude and working memory did not significantly predict explicit or implicit knowledge of the targeted difficult and easy grammar points for the cohort of participants as a whole. Another analysis by level group (Level 5, Level 7, Level 9) indicated that the cognitive variables did not significantly predict explicit knowledge of easy or difficult grammar points. However, with respect to implicit knowledge, working memory significantly predicted implicit knowledge of easy grammar points in Level 5, and language aptitude marginally predicted implicit knowledge of difficult grammar points in Level 5. Overall, the findings support the view that language aptitude and working memory are better predictors at lower levels of proficiency. The findings of this study contribute to researchers’ understanding of the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge and the relevance of language aptitude and working memory at different levels of proficiency.

There are various types of educational contests held across disciplines and institutions in China every year, including debate contests, speech contests, reading contests, writing contests, spoken English contests, and teaching contests. The Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press National College English Teaching Contest (hereafter SFLEP contest) is such an example. It is a large-scale teaching contest held annually throughout 1,500 Chinese universities for Chinese EFL teachers engaged in tertiary education. Every year, 20 winning contestant teachers are chosen from the contest and their mock teachings (a particular contest segment in which the contestant teachers teach in a quasi-classroom environment) in the finals of the SFLEP contest are recorded and presented to the public through various media, such as Youku (a very popular online video website in China, www.youku.com). Moreover, the contest adjudicators make comments on these privileged examples and their comments are published by one of the contest sponsors, the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, as well. As these mock teachings are not authentic classroom teaching, but the teaching performances in the contest, they represent the privileged meta-pedagogical examples that the contest organizers want to present to the contest audience. For the same reason, these comments of the mock teachings also represent the meta-pedagogical opinions of the contest adjudicators in the contest, which the contest organizers want the contest audience to access. There are studies which explore the collective identity types reflected in the contest discourses and studies which discuss the impact of teaching contest on authentic teaching. The former type of study offers ways of understanding teaching contest practices as spontaneous events which put forward their particular meta-pedagogical models to the contest audience; the second type of study offers ways of understanding the impact and washback influences of these models on authentic teachings. No prior studies, however, explore how the teaching practices in authentic teachings are borrowed into the teaching contest. It is the hypothesis of the present thesis that the classroom-based pedagogic models are borrowed in and adapted in the contest discourses before they are presented to the contest viewers. The research purpose of the thesis is to test this hypothesis with discourse analytic approaches. The data used in the thesis include the published recordings of 20 winning mock teachings in the finals of 2nd SFLEP contest, together with 40 published adjudicators’ comments on these mock teachings. The analytic approach used in the thesis is primarily Martinian systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Martin, 2004). The thesis goes through a three-step analysis of the data. Firstly, it analyzes the register configuration of the mock teaching discourse; secondly, it compares these analytic results with a prior study of ESL pedagogic genre (Lee, 2011); thirdly, it analyzes the contest adjudicators’ post-contest comments as to what genre instances and individuations are valued / devalued in these comments. The research results are three-fold. First, the research reports the particular register features of the mock teaching data used. Second, the mock teaching discourse as a genre is no different from the ESL pedagogic genre at its stages; however, it is different from the ESL pedagogic genre at its sub-stages, phases, and register configurations. Third, certain stages, sub-stages, and phases of the mock teaching genre are chosen and further evaluated by the contest adjudicators in their post-contest comments. Within these evaluated segments of the genre, instances are either valued or devalued. Moreover, the valued genre instances all point to Interventionism, a certain pedagogic type according to Bernsteinian pedagogical classification (see also Chapter 2). The research results lead to this thesis’ primary contribution by giving a new dimension for the explanation of the teaching contest discourse. Based on its research results, the thesis proposes that the teaching contest discourse as a macrogenre has the social function of borrowing in and changing the classroom pedagogic genre and then refining this genre for the purpose of representing a privileged meta-pedagogic identity in the contest. Apart from this, the thesis also makes contributions to SFL genre theories. First, it proposes that the genre changes in the mock teaching discourse are a phenomenon of genre blurring, as they maintain the abstract form of pedagogic genre while adapt this genre to the contest environment at more constitutional levels. Although prior SFL genre theories can define the mock teaching genre as a genre generated from pedagogic genre, there are no explanations of how the genre changes happen along with the register shift and ideological control. Second, it proposes that the evaluation of genre instances and individuations in the contest adjudicators’ post-contest comments is a phenomenon of genre solidification as the evaluation re-classifies a genre and picks certain instances to represent a privileged narrowed-down genre form in the contest. It is therefore a more delicate way to classify and solidify genre types.

This socio-linguistic study investigates attitudes of French speakers of English to using English for academic purposes. The study is situated within the post-Fioraso Law period (2013), which sees France joining the process described as the ‘internationalisation' of Higher Education in Europe. This study confirms that rather than encouraging multiple languages in academia, the term ‘internationalisation' implies ‘Englishisation' in Europe by contributing to studies which show how English is instrumental to academic identity in Europe. Through the use of complementary qualitative methods (questionnaires, interviews, visual methods and classroom observations), the narratives of 164 academics working at the science faculties of Nantes University were analysed for how they positioned their professional identities in relation to the use of English for professional purposes (such as writing research papers, presenting at conferences, and teaching in English as a medium of instruction, EMI). The major divisions regarding the attitudes towards English as a medium of academic identity in France are to be found in the issues relating to the legitimacy and authority of French speakers of English within the wider international academic community. The principal arguments are based on beliefs concerning the ownership of the English language and whether it is possible for L2 speakers of English to ever identify themselves as being anything other than ‘learners of English', despite repeated proof of their language expertise. The study concludes that within French Higher Education in 2016, English is a strategic medium through which to access research and teaching communities. Ownership of the English language as an identifying feature comes second to the emerging bilingual identities of the participants who are competing in the global market of Higher Education.

This research assessed students’ self-perception of communicative competence in EFL in a Mexican university. I argued there was a gap in the knowledge available in the field at the tertiary education level in Mexico that needed filling because of the impact that self-perception has on individuals’ decisions to act, in this case, to engage in communication acts in the foreign language. The objectives guiding my research were: first, to address the information gap; second, to test the scale created for this study (CCQ); and third, to explore influences on students’ self-perceptions in this context. Self-perception and its cognitive (efficacy) and affective (confidence) elements were proposed as the aspects of the self-concept to be addressed. Evidence supported identifying Language Identity, Attribution Theory, and Ideal and Ought-to Self Theory as emerging frameworks to understand students’ self-perceptions. Willingness to communicate was also related to this research. A mixed methods approach was followed: A quantitative survey (CCQ) assessed self-perception for a sample of first year university students (n=372); PCA was conducted on the scale and reliability was established (Cronbach alpha .950). Descriptive statistics of background variables displayed the characteristics of the sample. Independent samples t-tests explored differences between self-perception and two-group variables, while one-way between groups ANOVA was applied to variables with three or more groups. Effect size (eta square) helped determine the strength of the relationships found. Two focus group sessions (n=5) comprised the qualitative component of the inquiry (investigated with exploratory thematic analysis), designed to explore influences sustaining participants’ self-perceptions and concepts about English in the era of globalisation. CCQ analysis provided an overall mean score (M=2.98), suggesting a moderately positive self-perception among the sample. Contrastingly, qualitative data revealed that participants’ self-perceptions, constructed from social and personal influences, were constantly short of the communicatively competent ideal and ought-to selves. The analysis suggested complex interrelationships between self-confidence and self-efficacy were behind consistently fragile self-perceptions of communicative competence in EFL in this setting. The tension between the data (highlighted by the complementary use of mixed methods of data collection), and the contextual and methodological limitations are discussed. The implications of the investigation include both macro and micro levels of analysis. Further recommendations include longitudinal studies and individual interviews to collect richer data about participants’ personal experiences in EFL. The contributions to knowledge are: First, the inquiry addressed the knowledge gap about students’ self-perceptions of communicative competence at university in the EFL context. Second, a new context-specific scale measuring self-perception (CCQ) was developed and validated for the university setting. Third, I offer a theoretical model relating self-perception, self-efficacy, and self-confidence, and a proposition of the influence of the theories identified on the social context and the self. In conclusion, university students’ self-perceptions of communicative competence were analysed and the outcome showed an overall picture of moderately positive self-perception among the cohort. Further analysis revealed a contrasting story of very low perceptions among individual students and the influences shaping self-perceptions were explored.