Italian L1 speakers of English L2 make specific and predictable errors when expressing particular temporal concepts in English. This was study principally designed to ask to what extent these errors are caused by L1 conceptual transfer: the influence of conceptual knowledge and patterns of conceptualisation from one language on production of another; A cognitive linguistics framework was adopted to: i) delineate the cognitive processes that may underlie conceptual transfer in general; and ii) reveal areas of potential conceptual difference for investigation within the tense and aspect systems of English and Italian. Taking a mixed methods approach, a twenty item cloze test was developed to target areas of potential conceptual difference between Italian and English. This was also used to generate qualitative think aloud reports. Allowing the investigator access to the thought processes underlying tense choice for target concepts, think aloud reports were able to reveal and explain more specifically examples of conceptual transfer in the first instance, and also as analysis progressed to distinguish between concept and conceptualisation transfer. Concept transfer refers to the influence of L1 stored conceptual knowledge and conceptualisation transfer to the influence of L1 conceptualisation patterns - both developed through exposure to one language - on the production of another. This thesis provides evidence for these two types of transfer as two distinct stages in interlanguage development. All participants - 54 Italian L1 speakers of English L2 (experimental group), 30 native English speakers (control), 50 native Italian speakers (control) and 40 Maltese speakers (control) - completed the cloze test, and 6 of the experimental group did this while thinking aloud. All the participants also performed a non-verbal task. Results of the statistical analysis show the experimental group had an increased error rate for target concepts. The concurrent think aloud protocols were analysed and cross referenced with the cloze test results. Think aloud reports indicated that participants thinking for the target concepts is constrained by L1 mediated cognitive processes giving rise to potential evidence for conceptual transfer distinguishing it from formal transfer and revealing L1 conceptual influence even in ‘correct’ responses. Moreover, the think aloud reports also provided evidence with which to differentiate between concept and conceptualisation This novel methodological approach represents an important and original contribution to the state of the art of conceptual transfer research to date as it serves to unmask conceptual transfer despite its numerous guises.

This study investigated the relationship between attitudes and motivation, and English language achievement. It also illustrated the influence of sex (males & females) on the attitudes and motivation of students in Qatar. Two main null-hypotheses and sub null-hypotheses were formulated to answer the main research questions of the study. A quantitative approach was implemented in a questionnaire survey, followed by a qualitative study using focus group interviews in order to explore the students` answers in more depth and to cover various issues missed in the questionnaire. The eleven scales of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) were adopted with slight adjustments to suit the present study. This instrument was chosen due to its established reliability and validity. In order to estimate population parameters, an independent t-test was used to test for differences between males and females. On the other hand, the Spearman correlation was used to determine the relationship between students’ achievement in English and their motivation and attitudes. The study confirms previous findings and contributes additional evidence to suggest that the socio-educational model is appropriate for a monolingual context like Qatar where English is officially regarded as a foreign language. Moreover, this study contributes to knowledge concerning language learning and confirms Gardner’s (2005, 2010, 2012) argument that if a researcher adapts the full AMTB and selects appropriate items, the findings will corroborate the predictions of the socio-educational model.

This study, based on classroom observation of ESL students, is an attempt to explore the effects of prior interactions on the learners' performance in communicative writing tasks. The study seeks to ascertain how classroom discourse generated by students as they interact prior to writing is shaped by the tasks and how it subsequently contributes to the quality of the written compositions. The basic hypotheses projected for the study were that different tasks would generate different quantities and qualities of interaction patterns which would correspondingly affect the written compositions. The nature of the tasks was seen as being instrumental in determining the variety of words rather than the amount of words used and that determined the quality of the compositions. Similarly, the generation of complex syntactic and cohesion features by the subjects was closely associated with the opportunity they were afforded by the tasks to interact. Narrative composition tasks in which there was substantial interactions were more likely to generate these language features than were the descriptive composition tasks in which there were restricted patterns of interaction. The study reveals, however, that the interaction patterns arising from the oral language gave rise to language features which got incorporated into the written compositions but did not conform with the conventions of the written language. Moreover, the discourse acts employed did not invariably bring about a coherent semantic relationship among propositions because of the subjects' low language proficiency and their inability to appropriately employ cohesion features associated with the expression of propositions. A survey among subjects of the study shows that collaborative learning in pairs or groups is regarded as being more favourable to promoting features of language that lead to good quality compositions than a teacher-fronted approach, although input from the latter is seen as a prerequisite for the smooth running of pair work and group work. However, there is a general consensus that group work is a better method of learning than pair work, apparently because group work, offers opportunity for more substantial interactions than pairwork which often culminates in interlocutors being unable to sustain a conversation in English.

A corpus of written English produced by three groups of adult French beginning learners of English as a foreign language over a period of approximately eight months was examined for evidence relating to the acquisition of past tense forms and related meanings. The findings provide evidence to support several hypotheses which can be usefully grouped within a single framework which sees language acquisition as a process of hypothesis formation and testing whose constraints are both first and second language in origin. These hypotheses can be summarised as follows: (1) Language learning involves the acquisition of a new system of expressing meaning. As a result, the learner engages in a process of matching linguistic form to underlying meaning both within and between languages. Only such a hypothesis, we believe, can satisfactorily explain the apparently random variation that was observed in our subjects' acquisition of past tense. (2) Language transfer is thus necessarily a widespread phenomenon, constraining learners' formation of hypotheses, but is itself constrained by the inter- and intra-language form-meaning transparency of the language item in question. In other words, whenever formmeaning relationships are not wholly transparent, transfer is to be expected. (3) Moreover, even when form-meaning relations are transparent, transfer may take place due to the learner's shortage of processing capacity. When this is lacking, learners tend to maintain communication by relying on existing procedural knowledge, which, at least in the early stages, means well-established first language procedures. This is because, even though humans can process at phenomenal speeds, this is only possible with procedures which are solidly in place. For the vast majority of language learners this implies that first language procedures will always take precedence over weaker second language procedures because they were later traced and are less frequently used. Under the circumstances, where demands are made on the learner, for example, to produce language in real time, there will be a tendency to bypass second language networks and rely on first language circuitry. Consequently, learners make use of their ability to operate a number of strategies (such as planning and monitoring their language output) to produce comprehensible language. This ability, labelled strategic competence, is identified as a key aspect in language use in general.

This study investigates students’ construction of the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom, that is, ESP teaching and learning, and uses the Participatory Design (PD) approach to the design of educational technology as a means to improve and refine our understanding of their construction of the classroom. The study was carried out with Brazilian university students on a Computer Science course. Following general guidelines of the PD approach, the researcher invited an ESP teacher, a number of students, and a Software Engineer to collaboratively design a Web Portal to support ESP teaching and learning. The research questions were: (i) how do students construct the ESP classroom? and (ii) to what extent does students´ involvement in the process of designing educational technology for ESP bring to light different elements of this construction? Data were collected in two phases. Firstly, an initial interview was carried out and then records of students´ participation in the workshops, their entries in an online diary and a final interview were collected. A bottom up approach was adopted to categorisation of the beliefs constituting the students’ construction of the classroom, and the analytical framework outlined by Benson and Lor (1999) was used to help to interpret and group these classifications. The final model of the students’ construction identified four groups of beliefs, clustered around the ideas of accumulation, communication, autonomy and unease with what the ESP course offered. The use of Participative Design as a method to facilitate the collection of data about the students’ construction of the classroom was found to be effective in enabling the research to move from an description based on students’ de-contextualised descriptions of the classroom in the initial interviews, to a more articulated and detailed level of description that emerged from involvement with the design task.

This study seeks to explore English teachers’ understandings of the challenges of classroom talk. A key assumption is that while many teachers and researchers view talk for learning as valuable, there is still a problem when it comes to actually using talk and small group learning widely. There are many different challenges that emerge when teachers try to promote this type of learning. Rather than study classroom discourse therefore, I wanted to focus on teachers’ understandings of how talk works in the classroom. This was the problem I wanted to research in more depth. I start the study with my own talk autobiography. I reflect on my own life in education and my life as a teacher in urban schools and highlight the role of talk, language and learning in my intellectual development. Having done this I identify the questions I wanted to ask teachers. I wanted to hear their stories of talk as pupils and as teachers. I chose to talk to six teachers at different stages of their careers in different phases of education. Later, I return to the teachers and ask them to video a lesson and identify what I am calling ‘a critical moment for talk’. We then evaluate such moments collaboratively. The study is sociocultural in approach. Further, the life narrative case studies draw on traditions of practitioner and feminist research with the aim of making teachers’ expertise more visible in wider debates about classroom talk. The analysis of the case studies suggests that a teacher’s own experiences in education and their values influence pedagogy and specifically their approach to talk. They reveal the challenges of dealing with conflicting power relationships within group work and during whole class dialogue and consider some solutions. The era and context are shown as particularly powerful factors in influencing pedagogy. Today what I refer to as the ‘talk for learning model’ is under attack and the focus has returned to the promotion of standard English. The aim of the study is make teachers’ intuitions and insights available about the place of talk and what they have found challenging about organising talk for learning.

In general, educational practices in Zairean secondary schools point to a positivistic orientation to literacy, in spite of the fact that one of the stated aims of secondary education is to encourage independent thinking in students. For this reason, one of the aims of the present study was to promote greater independence in students by presenting a humanistic-interpretive approach to reading, as demonstrated by the practice of sustained silent reading. For this purpose, some of the students involved in the study (the experimental subjects) were presented with graded readers in English, in a 20h (1h/week) experimental reading programme. Moreover, in keeping with the view of reading as a unitary process, transferable across languages, a second aim of the study was to explore the possibility of transfer in reading ability between French as a L2 and English as a FL. Data were supplied by experimental and control subjects from questionnaires and cloze passages in French, and in English, that were administered before and after the reading programme. These data failed to provide unequivocal evidence for the expected transfer and improvement, and reasons are offered for this outcome. Nonetheless, the experimental subjects performed as well as the control subjects at the second administration of the measurement instruments. In other terms, one hour of sustained silent reading in English, along with 4 hours of traditional EFL teaching, appeared to be as educationally beneficial as the usual 5 hours/week orally driven, teacher-directed EFL classroom practice.

This thesis investigates the professional development of TESOL teachers during a postgraduate peer-taught course in English Philology at the Pedagogical University in Krakow, Poland. The analysis, conducted on the basis of a Grounded Theory approach, examines how an ICT CPD course influenced the professional development of forty newly-qualified Polish teachers of English as a Foreign Language, who engaged in peer teaching as a central component of the course. The research uncovers and examines teacher beliefs and knowledge in a setting characterised by a high degree of autonomy. The study proposes that the participants, in order to present themselves as competent and self-assured ELT professionals, acted upon the notion of the ‘good teacher’ through both the tacit and the explicit CMC-based negotiation of a collaboratively structured teaching model consistent with their beliefs. In the process of designing ICT-rich English lessons, the participants, guided by their beliefs, ascribed value to subject-specific pedagogical knowledge and skills, foregrounding pedagogy and normalising the technology. The role of autonomy is confirmed as a prerequisite for the kind of practice which supports and enables the pedagogical development of teachers in such an ICT CPD. The thesis offers an original contribution in its presentation of a new construct for understanding teacher belief in the context of technology-related settings. The Technological Pedagogical and Content Beliefs construct (TPACB) attempts to capture the relationship between different types of teacher beliefs, and complements a parallel knowledge construction model - Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge – by offering a proposition which illuminates the nature of the interplay of the beliefs relevant to the field of TESOL and other areas of education. In addition, the study proposes a model for an ELT CPD practicum which encourages development in pedagogical knowledge and beliefs while promoting the integration of ICT into practice.

Performance in an assessment is not the reflection of just one’s knowledge and skills;motivation also plays a part. When the stakes of the assessment are low, it is logical to assume that students will have lower motivation to perform well in it. The Diagnostic English Language Tracking Assessment (DELTA) diagnoses and tracks students’ English language progress during their years of study at three universities in Hong Kong. Although the DELTA is a low stakes assessment, students get a report with their DELTA measure and detailed feedback on their performance. This study provides insights into test motivation as well as how useful students find a diagnostic report is to their language learning by ways of questionnaire survey and group interview, so as to explore students’ perceptions of test stakes and test value. The survey includes the Student Opinion Scale by Sundre and Moore (2002),which measures students’ motivation during the test; and a feedback usefulness scale specifically designed for this study to measure students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the diagnostic report. The results show that both scales are valid instruments to be used in this context and students are not motivated whilst sitting the test although they find the DELTA report quite useful. Data from the students’ interviews provide further information as to students’ motivation before and after the DELTA. In general they are not motivated before the test and their motivation to work on their English after the test largely depends on their perceived usefulness of the DELTA report. Lastly, as L2 motivation is a dynamic entity which will not remain constant over time, the study also demonstrates how Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) process model of L2 motivation can be adapted in explaining students’ test preparation and test taking process in low stakes diagnostic tests.

This study aims to explore the non-linear interactions between the self-perceived affective experiences of a group of learners and their self-evaluated performances in a foreign language (FL) classroom through the lens of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST), a theory which developed from advances in the understanding of complex and nonlinear systems in physics and mathematics. The present study bridges several disciplines, namely, mathematics, physics, psychology, applied linguistics and education, in order to avoid over-simplifying the phenomenon by focusing on fragments of reality. This study endeavours to transcend the boundaries between the above disciplines. Abstract DST concepts from mathematics and physics were initially translated into tangible FL terms acceptable to social science researchers. In addition, in order to engage with the learners, a phenomenographic approach was adopted as a qualitative method to explore the dynamism of the learners’ affective experiences and their reflections on their experiences from a second order perspective. 12 second-year Chinese students of English from a Foreign Language University in China participated in this six-month longitudinal study. Diary, Qualitative Survey, Semi-structured Interview and Class Observation were utilised for data collection. Thematic Analysis (TA) was employed to describe the phenomena at a collective level. Finally, a three-layer model, the Dynamic Model of Foreign Language Development was proposed to draw a conclusion from this study, aiming to present a novel way of understanding the distinctive features of the learners’ constant self-evaluations and their perceptions in the different contexts across time. In summary, at a collective level, the relevant attractor states from the second layer, which were determined by three main forces, namely, cognition, emotion and motivation from the first layer, contribute to making up the relevant learning experiences in the third layer. This study has contributed to the under-studied area of emotions and performance in FL learning. Several research and pedagogical implications have been identified. The results of this study contribute to a possible way to figure out terminological issues in an interdisciplinary study. The findings suggest that DST could allow a researcher to situate emotions and performances in one iterative system. DST might provide a possible logical solution to such a causality dilemma.