The study aims to investigate the effect of airline one-year placement experience on Taiwanese students’ development and acquisition of L2 pragmatic competence focusing on their English speech act behaviours. 50 subjects participated in this study, including 10 airline staff and 40 hospitality university students. Two instruments - the Discourse Completion Test and the Focus Group Interview were used to elicit the request strategies from three research groups for analysis. The results of the study demonstrated that exposure to the target speech community specifically a year-long airport placement is relatively influential for the pragmatic development of Taiwanese hospitality university students. The findings in this study also showed that there is a positive relationship between linguistic proficiency and pragmatic ability. It is observed that the participants with better performance in the linguistic and grammatical knowledge tend to show equivalent pragmatic development more than the participants with lower proficiency. The study is believed to significantly contribute in three directions. Firstly, the findings of this study provide valuable data for the development of pragmatic competence in airline English learning. An overall review of the relevant literature shows that there are no studies until now that have explored the effects of airline placement on the pragmatic development of Taiwanese hospitality university students in terms of their English request realisation. Secondly, the results of the study can serve as important practical evidence and can provide guidelines for airline English instructors to start considering how to integrate effective instruction with intercultural pragmatic learning in their teaching materials and curriculum design in order to assist Taiwanese hospitality university students to acquire the pragmatic and social cultural abilities to meet the airline workplace language requirement in the future. Thirdly, the results of the study also revealed information about the pragmatic performance of Taiwanese ground staff; senior employees and supervisors. Therefore, it is hoped that the results of the study can raise the awareness of both English course planners and administrators in Taiwanese airlines to develop appropriate airline English courses for ground staff in order to improve ground staff’s English communication competence when dealing with passengers and also reach the standard of good service quality.

This thesis addresses the quality of ‘difference’ in L2 English argumentative essays written by Japanese students by focusing on the use of metadiscursive nouns. It does this by comparing the similarities and differences in the use of 33 shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) as discourse construction devices in two corpora: the Japanese subcorpus of ICLE – Japanese writing in English as a foreign language – and the US subcorpus of LOCNESS – Americans writing in English as a first language. Based on Schmid’s (2000) theory, discourse roles of shell nouns are analysed according to three aspects: noun frequencies, syntactic patterns where shell nouns occur, and lexicalisation of nouns. This thesis demonstrates that one source of different impressions in non-native speaker writing stems from their use of shell nouns. The findings show that each group of students uses shell nouns differently, most notably for anaphoric referring functions. Employing different lexicalisation patterns, Japanese students use nouns for these functions more frequently than American students. Different lexicalisations are correlated with preferred discourse construction and argumentation patterns in each of the corpora. This thesis describes the findings and discusses causes of difference that suggest a transfer of L1 cultural values and essay conventions. Aspects of shell noun usage that the Japanese students tend not to handle well are identified and implications for pedagogical practice are discussed.

This study uses the lens of community of practice and teacher development studies to show the teacher development processes of three young novice American teachers who participated in the TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea) programme, a Korean languageteaching programme launched in 2008. Hired as ‘TaLK scholars’, after four weeks of TaLK orientation they were allocated to local primary schools to teach after-school English classes for 15 hours a week. The study conceptualises these two sites each as a community of practice. The fieldwork for this study was carried out from February 2012 to November 2012. The data were collected through diary entries, interviews and classroom observations. This study uses the lens of community of practice and teacher development studies to show the teacher development processes of three young novice American teachers who participated in the TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea) programme, a Korean language teaching programme launched in 2008. Hired as ‘TaLK scholars’, after four weeks of TaLK orientation they were allocated to local primary schools to teach after-school English classes for 15 hours a week. The study conceptualises these two sites each as a community of practice. The fieldwork for this study was carried out from February 2012 to November 2012. The data were collected through diary entries, interviews and classroom observations. The findings from this study are that, first, both the TaLK programme and the host schools must do more to engender a sense of belonging, so that young novice teachers can become legitimate members of their two communities. Secondly, novice teachers can best develop their identities as practitioners when they are allowed and encouraged to be creative in their learning and teaching activities. Thirdly, working in a new linguistic and cultural environment demands intensive learning on the part of all collaborating teachers, and this requires an openness to cultural difference.

Cognitive approaches to language teaching recognize conceptual metaphor awareness-raising activities as techniques that aid the understanding of metaphors in second or foreign languages (L2) such as English. However, the benefits of these techniques do not extend to the retention, production or interpretation of metaphors. These are important skills that could help language learners in their use of metaphor in the real world. This thesis focuses on the embodied nature of L2 metaphors through awareness-raising activities that incorporate bodily actions and tactile contact. Through four experimental classroom studies with university-level female EFL Saudi learners, this thesis explores the impacts of employing awareness-raising activities of conceptual metaphors and embodied metaphors. The first and second studies compare conceptual metaphor awareness to traditional semantic clustering and highlight the role of conceptual metaphor awareness in understanding metaphoric expressions. The third study introduces embodied metaphor awareness-raising activities through bodily actions and compares them to conceptual metaphor awareness and semantic clustering. The fourth study explores the benefits of using embodied tactile metaphor awareness-raising activities in the learning of linguistic and pictorial metaphors in advertising. The thesis finds that awareness-raising activities based on embodied metaphors have the potential to foster a deeper learning of metaphors in the L2.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the influence of self-assessment on the writing of inexperienced EFL Libyan university students’ writing. Data was collected from one hundred fourth year students majoring in English. The essays were each 300 words in length. The students were divided into experimental and control groups and 40 essays (20 from each group) were selected for analysis. The study uses a pre-self-assessment/post-self-assessment comparison of two groups of writers. The key research instrument was a self-assessment sheet which asked students to assess the content, organisation and language of their essays. Students were asked to revise their writing after using the self-assessment sheet. In addition to the self-assessment sheet, a post- study feedback form was given to elicit the students’ attitudes towards the use of self-assessment to guide their revision of writing. Further, a questionnaire completed by Libyans in the UK was also used in this study to elicit key contextual information about the writing context of the study. The results of the study showed that the writers in the experimental group who used self-assessment to guide their revision made more revisions than those in the control group. The result also demonstrated that the majority of students in the experimental group had a positive attitude towards the self-assessment technique. While there are limitations mainly due to the political and social climate at the time the research was conducted, this thesis demonstrates to some extent the important role of using self-assessment in developing inexperienced students’ writing.

This research explores the final assessment of language competence of future foreign language (FL) teachers (university graduates) in the Russian educational context. Foreign Language teacher training has always been an essential part of Russian education and its importance increased in the 1990s. Later however, with significant educational reforms at primary and secondary school level, teacher training became an area of least attention and interest from the Ministry of Education of Russia and local education authorities. This research is based on the belief that no school reforms are possible without investing in teachers and, therefore, in initial and in-service teacher education, with assessment being one of its key dimensions. The study aims to describe optimal methods of assessing language competence of novice teachers of English as a FL in Russia. For this purpose, the following objectives have been achieved: - a description of current notions of FL teacher language competence, based on analyses of previous theoretical and empirical research; - design of exam evaluation tools – 3 questionnaires and an interview framework, and their use in data collection from various stakeholders in a Russian state pedagogical university; - identification of strengths and weaknesses of the current Final language assessment; - description of possible alternative options for the Final Language Examination and discussion of their impact on different stakeholders. The research follows a mixed-methods design with both qualitative and quantitative data collected and discussed. The study involves various stakeholders at different levels and from different backgrounds – university students, Final Exam takers; Exam designers and administrators, and also teachers of English who provided their valuable vision of the current Final Language Examination and its possible alternatives. The data obtained through surveys and interviews allows for tentative conclusions on the current Language Examination’s appropriacy and relevance, and provides ground for a multi-faceted analysis of the Exam’s strong points and weaknesses, and for development of alternative assessment tasks. The research concludes by viewing possible changes in the Exam as likely and less likely to happen in the near future, based on analysis of the Russian higher education context.

This is an instrumental case study that focuses on the construction of English Language Learner Identity (ELLI) in postcolonial Pakistan. It is a study of students at a public sector university in the province of Sindh. The study broadly examines how English language learners reconstruct, redefine and negotiate their language learner identities during their English language learning journeys. In particular, it attempts to explore learners’ investment and agency in learning English and what ‘future possible selves’ they want to achieve after acquiring English language skills. Consideration is given to how learning English as a second language may be impacted by students’ gender, social class and ethnolinguistic selves and how learners’ English Language Learner Identity is formed and reformed in postcolonial Pakistan. This instrumental case study of the University of Sindh did not attempt to explore the case in its entirety but rather studied a particular aspect of it. In order to gather the data for my study I recruited three cohorts - primary (Year 1) and secondary (Year 2, 3 and 4) participants and other stakeholders from the Institute of English Language and Literature (IELL), the University of Sindh (UoS). Year 1 students were the key participants in the study but with the involvement of 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students, I was able to construct a possible sense of language learner identity and language learning evolution beyond the first year students’ experiences. Year 1 students were interviewed twice over a twelve-month period during which time they also wrote reflective diaries twice a month. Engagement with each of the other year groups involved one focus group discussion with each year once only in the middle of the data collection journey. In addition, participant shadowing and non-participant classroom observations were also utilised to enhance understanding and to triangulate the data. The views of other stakeholders such as the language teacher, the Director of the Institute and the Dean of the Faculty were also gathered to supplement and inform the data collected from students. The key findings of this study suggested that investment, learner agency, desire for possible future selves and historical and cultural consciousness are the main constructs of language learner identity in postcolonial Pakistan. Learners have invested in English language learning through a number of processes and have had unique language learning journeys exercising their learner agency. It reinforced an understanding of learners’ identities as dynamic and multidimensional and fluid in nature, being continually reconstructed and negotiated over time in different academic, social and cultural contexts leading to a hybridised English Language Learner Identity (ELLI) situated in the ‘third space’. It was found that Year 1 students were open to negotiating their multidimensional identities but conformed to an acceptance of the primacy of English while their senior counterparts resisted and sometimes challenged not only English language learning but also the significance of English as a mechanism for linguistic and cultural manipulation. It was noticed that the nature and extent of investment, agency and identity negotiations were related to learners’ individual experiences, social class, academic, family and ethnolinguistic background and their year of the degree programme.

This study is a mixed methods approach, consisting of a questionnaire and narrative interviews that opened the opportunity to investigate motivation in KSA by employing a post-positivist stance. This study is specifically aimed at investigating the attitudes and perceptions underpinning the motivation of Saudi students studying English in higher education. This study was limited to male students studying English in a preparatory programme at a private university in the Eastern Provence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The scope of this study was to identify social, cultural, personal and emotional factors that underpinned the attitudes and perceptions of Saudi students studying English in higher education and thereby this study established a foundation for motivational studies in Saudi Arabia. In addition, this study established a first time approach to employ the Dialogical Self Theory to triangulate data between multiple methods so that the interpretation and analysis of data could lead to expanding the previous definitions of integrative and instrumental orientations of motivated behaviour in motivation and SLA studies. Furthermore, this study established DST's debut in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The advantage of employing DST in this study was to ensure as much as possible that the voices of the research participants were genuinely reflected in the analysis and interpretation of data. In accordance with the literature search during this research, this study marks the first attempt to describe the constructs of a motivational profile of Saudi students studying English in higher education. The data suggested that Saudis demonstrated strong adherences to cultural and social supportive positions associated with or intertwined with high religious values toward constructing their self-identities. However, there are at least two succinct strategies that the students employ to lessen their internal social power struggles between their local selves and their reaching out to the global community that communicates in English with their global selves. The group that was less likely to reach outwards to the global community and feel being a part of it generated strategies around various degrees of strict cultural compliance to achieve feelings of safety within the self's society of the mind. The participants who were more likely to feel global through employing English constructed strategies and plans around hybrid-models within their self-identity to balance their desire to be part of the world community and to be true to their desire of compliance to cultural values. Students who were less likely to feel a belonging to the global community were more influenced by internal factors such as: a fear of assimilation and a fear losing Arab identity, which led to constructing strategies aimed at a greater adherence to cultural compliance. In addition, this study utilized Sullivan's (2010) theory that Vygotsky's (1978) dialectic understanding of juxtaposed positions and Bakhtin's (1984) dialogical understanding of vertically regulated values are not mutually exclusive, rather mutually inclusive. The result was that motivation can be imagined as a dynamic 3-D construction occurring within a certain context with other. This research employed a 29 item motivational questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale constructed by using formerly employed themes that were shown to have had a greater impact on motivation and language acquisition. This study is unique as it triangulated quantitative data with narrative interviews by allowing common themes formerly associated with motivation and SLA to be expanded by the participants voices, which not only expanded some definitions formerly associated with motivation and SLA, but also subjected them to the refutability. This study concluded that effort and self-confidence were the attributes that most likely underpinned the construction of a hybrid model of the self, which opened opportunities of English acquisition both within the classroom setting and outside of it. Those who were less likely to feel a belonging to the global community that communicates in English were more likely to construct strategies around local Arab traditions and were shown to have to a greater fear of integrating themselves into international scenarios related to English use. Through triangulating multiple data sources, it was possible to assess the values students attached between their internal and external positions at four distinct levels: cultural, social, personal and emotional.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand and describe the educators’ experiences of English learner underachievement. The overall aim was to discover and illuminate the essences of this phenomenal experience. The essences embody what is immanent and universal to the phenomenon, what makes the phenomenon the way it inherently is, and what cannot be removed from the phenomenon. This study sought to reveal the general essential features educators’ experiences of English learner share. Furthermore, it was an attempt to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world of everyday human experience. The school system where the study took place is located in southeast Georgia, United States. The group of elementary, middle, and high school educators who participated in the study consisted of eight professional women of diverse cultural backgrounds. All of them had extensive experience of working with English learners in the environment where English was the primary medium of instruction. Data were collected using in-depth interviews and essays. Participant confidentiality was maintained throughout the data collection and analysis. The collected data were organized and analyzed using Moustakas’s modified version of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method that utilizes the processes of the epoché, phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation, and synthesis. Several textural and structural categories emerged from the analysis of the data. The textural thematic categories included: underachieving English learner performance in school, emotional and psychological barriers, language and cultural change, prior educational experience, family’s socioeconomic status and parental involvement, educational practices and teacher attitudes. The structures underlying the educators’ experience of English learner underachievement were represented through evaluation, observation, communication and interaction, development of professional awareness and accountability, examination of students’ backgrounds, professional collaboration, and examination of educational practices. The totality of what the educators experienced in relation to English learner underachievement reveals that no aspect or quality of this phenomenon can be singled out to prevail in this phenomenal appearance. What makes the phenomenon of English learner underachievement intricately complex is its multi-dynamic character which emerges amidst educational, cultural, and socioeconomic inequities. English learner underachievement is ingrained in the structures of school and society. The key findings from the study suggest that educators need to create effective learning situations to accommodate individual needs of underachieving English learners. Similarly, educators need extensive support from the school, district, and policy in ways that help them gain professional knowledge of approaches, strategies, and programs to provide quality education to all English learners. The study has contributed to the overall understanding of the phenomenon of English learner underachievement and drawn attention to the importance of the educator voice in educational decision making.

This study focuses on the factors which explain Abu Dhabi Education Council’s (Adec) English curriculum choice in grade ten and eleven public high schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It investigates the challenges its implementation poses for teachers personally and professionally. The study is exploratory and interpretive and is based on the perceptions of 12 male teachers; 6 Arab teachers of English and 6 “native” English speaking teachers at 3 boys’ public high schools in the Abu Dhabi emirate. Data were gathered through lengthy semi-structured interviews with teachers, analysis of Adec curriculum and assessment documentation as well as open, non-participant classroom observations. The findings show the current curriculum, modelled on that used in NSW mainstream schools in Australia up until the end of 2014 is an inappropriate choice for students learning English as a foreign/second language in a school environment where all other subjects are taught in Arabic. This in turn provides a range of challenges for teachers who are unable to implement the course content as it was intended or the learner / learning-centred pedagogical approaches promoted by the curriculum and assessment documentation. The study recommends a realistic assessment of students’ language needs be undertaken as a top priority and, based on these findings, English classes streamed according to students’ language proficiency; with curriculum and assessment designed to reflect the various stages of learning. Ability grouping would enable specialist teachers to target areas of strength and weakness, thus countering the boredom and frustration currently experienced by many students. The study also recommends future stakeholder consultation, an in-depth orientation for newly hired teachers and professional development for incumbent teachers in scaffolded language instruction.