The main research question investigated in this thesis is: In an era when English is increasingly used in international contexts, how relevant are the grammatical findings of native speaker spoken corpora in the ELT classroom? In terms of original research data, the thesis draws, initially, on data from a large-scale quantitative survey into the attitudes of students and teachers to conforming to native speaker norms. The data from this survey shows that a desire to conform to native speaker norms is not restricted to learners with an obvious need to interact with native speakers. The research evidence also indicates that there is some interest among both teachers and students in conforming to native speaker spoken norms, though there is uncertainty about what these norms are, and reservations about whether they should be part of the learner's productive repertoire. The thesis includes a set of materials designed to be consistent both with the results from the attitudinal research and with current methodological insights from second language acquisition research. The thesis describes how these materials were evaluated and piloted, both to elicit further research evidence concerning the attitudes of learners and teachers to native speaker spoken norms, and to assess the potential viability of the materials in the classroom. In the light of the theoretical arguments and research evidence presented, the thesis concludes that it is both possible and potentially desirable to design materials which raise awareness of aspects of native speaker spoken grammar, while respecting that English is no longer the exclusive property of its native speakers. The wider, concluding argument of this thesis is that it is both possible and desirable for the native speaker in contemporary ELT to be an object of reference without being an object of deference.

The English language has an important place in Pakistan and in its education system, not least because of the global status of English and its role in employment. Realising the need to enhance language learning outcomes, especially at the tertiary level, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan has put in place some important measures to improve the quality of English language teaching practice through its English Language Teaching Reforms (ELTR) project. However, there is a complex linguistic, educational and ethnic diversity in Pakistan and that diversity, alongside the historical and current role of English in the country, makes any language teaching reform particularly challenging. I argue, in this thesis, that reform to date has largely ignored the issues of learner readiness to learn and learner perceptions of the use of English. I argue that studying learner attitudes is important if we are to understand how learners perceive the practice of learning and the use of English in their lives. This study focuses on the attitudes of undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language at two universities in the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan in Pakistan. These provinces have experienced long struggles and movements related to linguistic and ethnic rights and both educate students from all of the districts of their respective provinces. Drawing on debates around linguistic imperialism, economic necessity, and linguistic and educational diversity, I focus on learners’ perceptions about learning and speaking English, asking what their attitudes are towards learning and speaking English with particular reference to socio-psychological factors at a given time and context, including perceived threats to their culture, religion, and mother tongue. I ask how they make choices about learning and speaking English in different domains of language use and question their motivation to learn and speak English. Additionally, I explore issues of anxiety with reference to their use of English. Following a predominantly qualitative mixed methods research approach, the study employs two research tools: an adapted Likert Scale questionnaire completed by 300 students and semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from the two universities. The data were analysed through descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis, with each set of data synthesised for interpretation. The findings suggest that, compared with the past, the majority of participants hold positive attitudes towards learning and speaking English regardless of their ethnic or linguistic backgrounds. Most of these undergraduate students do not perceive the use of English as a threat to their culture, mother tongue or religious values but, instead, they have a pragmatic and, at the same time, aspirational attitude to the learning and use of English. I present these results and conclude this thesis with reference to ways in which this small-scale study contributes to a better understanding of learner attitudes and perceptions. Acknowledging the limitations of this study, I suggest ways in which the study, enhanced and extended by further research, might have implications for practice, theory and policy in English language teaching and learning in Pakistan.

This study focuses on the learning and teaching of Reading in English as a Foreign Language (REFL), in Libya. The study draws on an action research process in which I sought to look critically at students and teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Libya as they learned and taught REFL in four Libyan research sites. The Libyan EFL educational system is influenced by two main factors: the method of teaching the Holy-Quran and the long-time ban on teaching EFL by the former Libyan regime under Muammar Gaddafi. Both of these factors have affected the learning and teaching of REFL and I outline these contextual factors in the first chapter of the thesis. This investigation, and the exploration of the challenges that Libyan university students encounter in their REFL, is supported by attention to reading models. These models helped to provide an analytical framework and starting point for understanding the many processes involved in reading for meaning and in reading to satisfy teacher instructions. The theoretical framework I adopted was based, mainly and initially, on top-down, bottom-up, interactive and compensatory interactive models. I drew on these models with a view to understanding whether and how the processes of reading described in the models could be applied to the reading of EFL students and whether these models could help me to better understand what was going on in REFL. The diagnosis stage of the study provided initial data collected from four Libyan research sites with research tools including video-recorded classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with teachers before and after lesson observation, and think-aloud protocols (TAPs) with 24 students (six from each university) in which I examined their REFL reading behaviours and strategies. This stage indicated that the majority of students shared behaviours such as reading aloud, reading each word in the text, articulating the phonemes and syllables of words, or skipping words if they could not pronounce them. Overall this first stage indicated that alternative methods of teaching REFL were needed in order to encourage ‘reading for meaning’ that might be based on strategies related to eventual interactive reading models adapted for REFL. The second phase of this research project was an Intervention Phase involving two team-teaching sessions in one of the four stage one universities. In each session, I worked with the teacher of one group to introduce an alternative method of REFL. This method was based on teaching different reading strategies to encourage the students to work towards an eventual interactive way of reading for meaning. A focus group discussion and TAPs followed the lessons with six students in order to discuss the 'new' method. Next were two video-recorded classroom observations which were followed by an audio-recorded discussion with the teacher about these methods. Finally, I conducted a Skype interview with the class teacher at the end of the semester to discuss any changes he had made in his teaching or had observed in his students' reading with respect to reading behaviour strategies, and reactions and performance of the students as he continued to use the 'new' method. The results of the intervention stage indicate that the teacher, perhaps not surprisingly, can play an important role in adding to students’ knowledge and confidence and in improving their REFL strategies. For example, after the intervention stage, students began to think about the title, and to use their own background knowledge to comprehend the text. The students employed, also, linguistic strategies such as decoding and, above all, the students abandoned the behaviour of reading for pronunciation in favour of reading for meaning. Despite the apparent efficacy of the alternative method, there are, inevitably, limitations related to the small-scale nature of the study and the time I had available to conduct the research. There are challenges, too, related to the students’ first language, the idiosyncrasies of the English language, the teacher training and continuing professional development of teachers, and the continuing political instability of Libya. The students’ lack of vocabulary and their difficulties with grammatical functions such as phrasal and prepositional verbs, forms which do not exist in Arabic, mean that REFL will always be challenging. Given such constraints, the ‘new’ methods I trialled and propose for adoption can only go so far in addressing students’ difficulties in REFL. Overall, the study indicates that the Libyan educational system is underdeveloped and under resourced with respect to REFL. My data indicates that the teacher participants have received little to no professional developmental that could help them improve their teaching in REFL and skills in teaching EFL. These circumstances, along with the perennial problem of large but varying class sizes; student, teacher and assessment expectations; and limited and often poor quality resources, affect the way EFL students learn to read in English. Against this background, the thesis concludes by offering tentative conclusions; reflections on the study, including a discussion of its limitations, and possible recommendations designed to improve REFL learning and teaching in Libyan universities.

A widely studied L2 behaviour in the SLA literature is that of the inconsistency in the production of functional morphology by advanced and endstate L2 learners. The level of inconsistency seems to vary among L2 learners, for instance, SD, a Turkish endstate learner of English (White 2003a) was highly accurate in the production of English inflectional morphology compared with Patty, also an endstate learner of English whose L1 is Chinese (Lardiere 2007). The literature is divided on whether to consider the absence of overt morphology in L2 performance to be a reflection of underlying syntax, thus indicating the absence of corresponding syntactic features, or whether it is an indication of a missing surface inflection only. A proponent of the first account is Hawkins (2009) who claims that a deficit in the L2 syntax, exemplified by the inability of L2 learners to acquire uninterpretable features not instantiated in the L1 grammar beyond the critical period causes the inconsistent suppliance of functional morphology in the interlanguage. On the other hand, Lardiere (2008) and Goad et al. (2003) describe types of post-syntactic problems causing variability: difficulty in mapping between different components of the grammar, and L1 transfer of prosodic structures, respectively. To test the claims of the above hypotheses, this study provides comparative data from two groups of L2 learners who differ with respect to the L1: Latakian Syrian Arabic or Mandarin Chinese. These two languages differ from each other in terms of which functional features are overtly represented in the morphosyntax, but are similar in the manner functional material is prosodified in relation to stems. Results based on the data collected do not lend support to claims of L1 prosodic transfer; they are rather compatible with an account that combines claims from both the Representational Deficit Hypothesis and the Feature Re-assembly hypothesis.

This thesis presents a new study on the L2 acquisition of pronominal binding in Korean and English in order to examine accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 2000, 2001) in adult L2 acquisition. Specifically, the study examines the L2 acquisition of grammatical knowledge of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti 1984) by English learners of Korean and the L2 acquisition of anaphoric binding by Korean learners of English. The first study investigates L2 speakers’ knowledge of the OPC, typically regarded as a universal constraint and a poverty-of-the-stimulus phenomenon. Previous L2 acquisition studies have only explored OPC effects when the pronoun is in subject position but not in object position. The current study aims to address this gap by investigating whether English learners of Korean can obtain nativelike knowledge of the OPC in subject and object positions. 41 English learners of Korean (intermediate and advanced) completed a co-reference comprehension task and a story-based translation task. Results from the experiment show that L2 speakers can successfully achieve nativelike knowledge of the OPC regardless of pronoun position and the study confirms the prediction that universal constraints need not be learnt. The second study focuses on L2 speakers’ knowledge of feature-based languagespecific constraints of anaphoric binding, following Hicks (2009), to examine the L2 acquisition of locality and orientation. 70 Korean learners of English (low-intermediate, intermediate, and advanced) completed a picture verification task and the results show that neither locality nor orientation constraints are properly acquired by most learners. This finding reveals that L2 speakers have difficulty in acquiring new feature configurations of the target grammar. This study also provides new evidence to support the view that cross-linguistic differences in this domain are derived from the interaction between language-specific feature specifications and universal reflexivisation mechanisms. In accordance with the results from the two studies, this thesis argues that while UG plays a significant role in explaining L2 speakers’ convergence to the L2 grammar, consistent with Full Access to UG (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996), divergence in L2 acquisition is caused by a failure to reconfigure new feature specifications. This is a result which supports the relevant role that Feature Assembly plays in second language acquisition (Lardiere 2008, 2009).

This PhD thesis is as investigation into the positionings, voices and experiences of students who use English for their postgraduate studies in the fields of business and English language teaching, in particular relation to their writing practices. Positioning this research as informing the English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and Global Englishes fields of enquiry, emergentism, complexity theory, performativity and integrationism are drawn on in order to assist with the interpretation and characterisation of the accounts of English offered by participants in the study, and to help understand what ‘language’ is in relation to ELF research. Further to these conceptual aims, English-as-a-medium-of-instruction programmes are investigated and discussed in order to understand how recent shifts in higher education are impacting on the lives and educations of students studying in the medium of English. The students’ accounts of their experiences offer insights into how aspects of educational and ecological practices impact on the linguistic realities of those studying on EMI programmes in these regions. Utilising semi-structured interviews and notes from the field, the findings indicate a high degree of diversity among student ‘communities’, with various backgrounds, orientations, experiences and future trajectories making variation an inherent characteristic of these groups and classrooms. The diversity found among and between contexts emphasises the primacy of temporal dimensions of language practices, as opposed to rigid geographical, disciplinary or cultural borders. Also, instances of students’ communicative engagements formed important parts of their conceptualisations of English (and language), but did not appear to align with current native / non-native dichotomies that are often prioritised in the field, as these linguistic landscapes are clearly more complex than can be accounted for by simple dichotomies. Regarding writing, the findings suggest that the proliferation of static notions of ‘academic style’ and ‘formal register’ as a priori properties of English academic writing can create a feeling of distance from the meaning making practices of formal written English. This, exacerbated by reported vocabulary shortages and a perceived need to repeatedly duplicate the same forms and structures in academic essays, presents a barrier to understanding what ‘academic writing’ does, who does it, and why they do it. It also seems evident that basing normative judgements of students’ writing on intrinsically sociocultural constructs of communication, which register, formality and aspects of structure inherently are, reifies aspects of writing that are more fluid in nature, thereby reinforcing a cognitive gap between how language works and how students are taught to communicate. This also presupposes a reader, or superaddressee, who is ‘western’, or, at least, who is an advocate of ‘western’ writing cultures. Such reifications could result from direct instruction or students’ own reactions to feedback (or, more likely, a combination of both), but either way they reinforce ideas of expertise and asymmetry between teachers and students, and between experts and novices, which results in feelings of frustration among some students. The findings support current moves in the field towards more critical and holistic forms of instruction and assessment that treat written language as a socially negotiated meaning making process, rather than as an endlessly reproduced body of pre-ordained parts that form a coherent static system of reference. Similarly, this research maintains that approaches to enquiry in Global Englishes and ELF can benefit from descriptivist engagement with people’s motivations, experiences, ideas and communicative behaviours when attempting to account for global linguacultural landscapes. Finally, it is proposed that those involved in EMI programmes might address potential issues in their contexts, particularly upon reflection on intersections between language and content, where uncritical treatment of language can result in difficulties for content instruction and assessment, and issues to student experience more generally.

In the field of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research, an overarching question is why native English should be exclusively followed by all users around the world regardless of their purposes of communication and identity projection. This provides the starting point of my investigation into Chinese speakers’ perceptions of their English in intercultural communication, which is traditionally considered as ‘learner English’ due to its difference from native English. Influenced by the ELF perspective, I consider Chinese speakers’ English as both fluid and subject to Chinese speakers’ appropriation according to their purposes in engaging intercultural communication, and label it as Chinese speakers’ English as a Lingua Franca (CHELF). Four dimensions of CHELF are considered in this research: linguistic creativity, community, identity and attitude, while the empirical data focuses on CHELF users’ perceptions in order to offer an insight into their attitudes, identities, beliefs, and contextual factors related to their perceptions. The research findings illuminate contrast, complementation, uncertainty and conservation in the participants’ attitudes towards, and identities in, their use of English, and reveal an interplay between a traditional EFL perspective and the ELF perspective that underlined their attitudes and identities. The data highlights contextual factors as playing a key role in influencing, shaping and developing the participants’ perceptions of ELF. Importantly, a good understanding of the concept of ELF makes a difference in the participants’ confidence in their ELF use. The findings thus suggest the possibility of CHELF developing legitimacy, as well as the challenges involved in such a development. This study thus provides a fresh insight into Chinese speakers’ English and contributes to ELF research at large. In particular, the establishment of contextual factors to CHELF users adds to the growing evidence of the necessity of including ELF in pedagogy.

Over the past three decades there has been increasing interest in foreign language classroom anxiety in both EFL and ESL settings. Many empirical studies have used a standardised tool to measure L2 anxiety in different contexts and findings have shown varying associations between L2 anxiety and learning outcomes. However, in EFL settings, the influence of cultural and contextual factors on L2 anxiety and L2 oral communication has not been extensively investigated. This thesis focuses on the nature of anxiety experienced by Japanese learners of English in higher education settings, and explores causative agents by looking into classroom pedagogic, social, cultural approaches without ignoring the impact of the nature of the institutions within which these occur. The research questions aim to explore how foreign language anxiety is influenced by institutional type, pedagogy, teacher and learner variables as well as classroom social factors. In addition, this research aims to explicate the cultural dimension of anxiety experienced in the Asian L2 context and how this affects the development of speaking skills. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative data collection procedures. The field work took place over a period of four months in four Japanese universities scattered over three prefectures. Whereas one hundred and forty students took part in a survey using a Japanese version of the well-known FLCAS scale, qualitative data was obtained from observing the classes and interviewing twenty four student and four teacher participants. The findings of this study suggest that Asian EFL learners experience different dimensions of anxiety from those reported in generic literature. Additionally, trainee teachers were found to experience higher levels of anxiety than learners in other disciplines. Teaching approaches largely predicted anxiety in the different classrooms studied. Furthermore, the Japanese learners were notably more anxious than their Asian counterparts; an outcome that is explained by cultural differences between the Japanese and other Asians. Finally, other anxiety predictors that emerged from the study were the age of the teacher and their self-presentation, as evidenced in their dress code. The results indicate that while the domains of anxiety experienced by Asian EFL learners are dissimilar to those in other regions, particularly, the Japanese learners differ from other Asians in both their anxiety profile and approaches to acquiring L2 speaking skills.

The field of language motivation is almost 60 years old. Throughout these decades, one idea has been persistent: Motivation is assumed to be a conscious process on which the learner can exert direct control. That this conscious conceptualization might not give the full picture has not been seriously entertained. An important consequence ensuing from this approach is the overreliance on self-report measures, such as questionnaires and interviews. Thus, in effect, the individual’s conscious reflection on their own attitudes and motivation has been the primary source of empirical data for our field. This thesis challenges this hegemony of conscious motivation. It provides an extensive review of the various paradigms of unconscious attitudes and motivation. It traces back their origins, highlights some of their major findings, and reviews the instruments used within each paradigm to circumvent direct self-report (as well as the controversies surrounding these instruments). The review also demonstrates that the adoption of an unconscious perspective is not inconsistent with major theoretical frameworks in the field. It then selects one of these paradigms, namely implicit attitudes, to apply in the context of language learning. Two studies were conducted on two independent samples (with almost 700 participants in total), in two different contexts (the UK and Saudi Arabia), and with different instruments of implicit attitudes (the Implicit Association Test and the Single-Target Implicit Association Test). Study 1 found that openness to language speakers at the implicit level is associated with more openness at the explicit level. Study 2 successfully replicated this finding, and extended it to language achievement—showing that learners with more favorable attitudes toward language speakers at the implicit level achieved higher grades in their English class. This finding could not be explained away by either social desirability or cognitive confounds. The results from these two studies were also meta-analyzed using Bayes factors in order to give an overall picture of the findings. The Discussion chapter wraps up this thesis by highlighting the relevance of this unconscious approach to the field more broadly. This chapter reviews a number of recent studies that have yielded similar findings to those from the current thesis. Some of these findings are then critically reanalyzed and reinterpreted in the context of unconscious motivation, thus demonstrating how adopting an unconscious approach helps view existing findings in a new light. In some cases, the analysis casts doubt on established ideas that have been taken for granted for decades. The overall message of this thesis is not that conscious motivation should be disregarded. Instead, conscious motivation should be complemented with a consideration of the role of unconscious motivation. A conscious-only approach would offer a limited window into human attitudes and motivation.

This thesis focuses on teaching English via corpus concordancing in a Greek university and is motivated by a need to find an improved approach to teaching and learning English for Specific/Academic Purposes so that university students improve their English language skills and motivation. I assemble a corpus of thirty million words containing texts from the domains of Special Education, General Academic, and General English. I compare and contrast a corpus teaching method (CTM) to a traditional teaching method (TTM) in terms of student performance in linguistic tasks and student motivation. I particularly explore (1) the extent to which CTM is more effective than TTM with regard to student performance as measured by the overall percentage of correct responses in student performance tasks, (2) the extent to which the effectiveness of CTM with regard to student performance on performance tasks is moderated by the ability level of the student (beginner, intermediate, advanced), (3) the extent to which the effect of method on student performance is mediated by student motivation after controlling for student level, and (4) what it is that motivates university students in Greece when involved in corpus concordancing compared and contrasted with existing traditional practice in learning English. Apart from performance measurement by percentage in four linguistic tasks assigned to students in the quantitative portion of this thesis, further data collection procedures to estimate motivation were item analyses of two motivational questionnaires, one about the contrast between CTM and TTM and one about the corpus concordancing software used in this study. The qualitative portion employs the use of an open-ended survey with five questions about CTM and TTM and a corpus style analysis of the survey. The objective of the qualitative part is to determine to what extent student motivation informs students’ preferred teaching style when asked to compare CTM and TTM, and to identify motivational and demotivational factors when using the one learning method or the other. The quantitative and qualitative findings are triangulated in order to validate interpretations. Key points of convergence between the quantitative and qualitative results are identified, which allowed a description of key student benefits and difficulties when CTM is used. An analysis of benefits and difficulties constituted the basis for the development of a suggested teaching unit to be utilized by teachers of English at university level. I demonstrate that CTM is more effective than TTM in the student performance tasks and that CTM is effective across all student ability levels with the advanced students performing better than the intermediate and beginner students. I also demonstrate that the sample of students was more motivated to learn English via CTM than via TTM and that student general motivation is a mediator in terms of the relationship between the teaching method and student performance. Finally, I demonstrate important features that motivate or demotivate students when following CTM or TTM. Based on the overall findings, I recommend a CTM exemplary teaching unit to be used by teachers who teach English at tertiary level. This thesis also offers useful guidance and practice to teachers of English and students on how to make use of a corpus concordancing software program to fulfil their teaching and learning purposes, respectively.