In the era of neoliberal globalisation, higher education has taken on new significance internationally in terms of its role in creating local knowledge economies to engage with the wider global economy. Universities across the world have responded to this commercial imperative by internationalising their curricula, in many cases employing English language-teaching professionals – particularly those from BANA/Western countries – to facilitate this transformation. While these educators perform a central function in globalising education, little is known about their experiences as migrant professionals and very few studies have examined the professional identities of such English language teachers. This study addresses the gap in research literature on English language teacher identities by exploring the professional lives of a group of eight Western English teachers working at an institution of higher learning in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The study examines the experiences of these language teachers in the UAE, considering both their self-perceived roles as educators, and the ways in which they regard their students (UAE nationals) and the communities of which they are a part. The research utilises interview data verified through summary-memos sent to the interviewees. The analysis of the data reveals that the teachers struggle with their various (and often conflicting) professional identities and the conflicts between "internationalised‟ higher education and the perceived realities of the local context. The evidence suggests that this struggle has resulted in feelings of alienation among teachers toward the institution for which they work. The analysis of interviews also reveals a perceived sense of estrangement toward students among the participants. In many cases this is expressed in their chauvinistic appraisals of "local culture,‟ which is regarded as an obstruction to the globalising institutional ethos. More broadly, the data shows that many of the attitudes exhibited by participants are reflective of ideologies that infuse the discourse of neoliberalism. In particular, these relate to notions of self-sufficiency, entrepreneurialism, privatisation, welfarism and the purposes of education. Assumptions linked to these attitudes have thus led the participants to evaluate their professional context and their students negatively. These assumptions are so prevalent in the discourse of the participants that they may be regarded as significant strands of their professional identities. The study is of particular significance in that it reveals conflict between the discourses of education and those of commercialisation/globalisation and the effect that this can have on professionals working within this domain. In a broader sense, the study exposes the tensions that arise when the macrostructural forces of globalisation intersect with local realities and the effects that this intersection can have upon social actors in these local contexts.

The present study is concerned with the process of how EFL learners organise their classroom participation. Although oral engagement is considered the main indicator of student participation, opportunities to participate in oral discussion are not always available to all students due to different issues, (e.g., a large number of students in the class). The main focus of this research is therefore to describe how students participate in classroom discussion through other modes rather than explicit oral participation. This study involves the analysis of different forms of student participation used alternatively in EFL classrooms. Such forms related to the ongoing discussion are employed for different purposes by EFL students. Since previous studies have focused on verbal participation such the interrelated issues between teacher-student exchanges, much remains to be learned about the micro-interactional practice used by language learners to participate in classroom interaction. Therefore, this study aims to extend the existing knowledge of student participation in EFL classrooms. The analysis of data is based on Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology which can be used to analyse language and its environment, including a combination of talk and the use of body in the classroom context. The data base consists of about 14 hours of video and audio recorded lessons taken from second and third-year students of English Departments in Libyan universities. The reason for using video and audio recordings is that to have good chance for deep analysis of talk and embodied action. The findings show that there are other forms of student participation, including embodied action and desk talk. Embodied action analysis reveals that students as collaborative members rely on a variety of embodiments to sustain classroom interaction. The results obtained from this analysis provide evidence of the extent to which such these embodiments are exploited by language learners to participate in their classrooms. This means that students are not only orally participating but they are also non-orally constructing a kind of group participation through distributing meaningful signals. Such signals include different patterns of gazes, facial expressions, nodding heads body orientation and movements towards teacher or class. In addition, the findings show that desk talk produced beyond teacher-student talk is actually relating to the ongoing discussion. Students produce such desk talk in order to cope with ongoing discussion and to compensate for their lack of explicit oral opportunities to participate in classroom discussion.

Thousands of English as a Second Language students in Western universities strive to meet the daily challenge of preparing written assignments. These texts need to comply with the demands and preferences of their university lecturers with regard to clarity of meaning, the logical flow of ideas and the use of an academic vocabulary. However, a characteristic of ESL students’ written work is a weakness of content and a lack of logical organisation of their ideas (Roberts and Cimasko 2008). In many intensive English language programmes, students are taught to use the process-writing approach, the success of which is related to how it is perceived and introduced to the students (Lefkowitz 2009). Atkinson (2003) emphasised that the process-writing approach perceives writing to be a cognitive process that is highly private or individualistic, where writers use specific cognitive phases, such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising, to generate their text. However, writing has been increasingly recognized as a socially and culturally situated activity connecting people with each other in ways that carry particular social meanings (Hyland 2003). Despite this view of writing as a social act, Lefkowitz (2009) claimed that many English Language Programme Centres (ELPCs) superficially implement process-writing in class by aiding students in revising their essays to achieve grammatical accuracy; however the generation, formation and revision of ideas are considered to be of less importance. This study investigates the use of an electronic portfolio (TaskStream e-portfolio) in an ESL writing course as a tool to support students as they work through the key phases of the writing process. The aim was to help them adopt a consistent approach to their writing practice (self-consistency), to encourage a positive view of the value and importance of writing (self-belief), to foster a realistic appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses as writers (self-judgement), and to examine the relationship between these characteristics and the students’ overall writing performance. To that end, the study addressed four main questions: • Does utilising a web-based learning platform encourage a change in ESL learners’ writing self-belief? • Does utilising a web-based learning platform encourage a change in ESL students’ writing self-efficacy? • Does utilising a web-based learning platform encourage ESL students to consistently apply a process approach to writing? • Does utilizing a web-based learning platform lead to a change in ESL students’ overall writing performance? Using a non-equivalent pre-/post-test quasi-experimental research design, 46 ESL students from the same English Language Centre were recruited. The students were divided into a control group and an experimental group and the study ran during the spring and summer terms of 2010. A mixed methodology was used, consisting of an online questionnaire, writing sampling, online tracking and interviews in order to collect relevant data. The findings from the pre-test showed no significant differences between the participants in the two groups. The post-intervention results indicated no significant improvement among the control group’s motivational constructs and performance in writing, whereas significant differences were found in the experimental group’s writing performance and in the students’ perceived value with regard to writing, writing self-concept, writing self-efficacy and writing process approach self-consistency, following the implementation of the web-based course. However, no significant differences in ESL students’ anxiety about writing were observed. These findings suggested that e-portfolio software has the potential to promote change in ESL students’ writing self-belief and performance. Limitations of the study are discussed, implications of the findings explored, and recommendations for further research in this field are suggested.

The acquisition of the English article system by speakers of article-less first languages (L1s) has been the subject of considerable research. Much of that research focuses on the extent to which second language (L2) learners interpret articles as markers of definiteness or specificity, and make use of semantic context to determine article choice (Ion in, Ko, & Wexler, 2004; Trenkic, 2008 among many others). The present thesis focuses on the role that noun type (count - mass - dual) plays as one of several factors determining the use of English articles by L2 learners whose Ll is Japanese (a language that lacks articles). Three experiments and a corpus-based frequency study are reported. The first experiment, a lexical decision task undertaken in Japanese with predominantly monolingual speakers of Japanese, aimed to determine how nouns are organised in the Japanese mental lexicon. From the findings it is argued that Japanese nouns are not specified for the mass-count distinction, although noun classifiers are. In the second experiment, a lexical decision task undertaken in English with Japanese L2 learners, it is shown that their English mental lexicons are organised in a similar way to native speakers. It is argued that this is the result of Japanese speakers using the mass-count distinction encoded by classifiers in the Ll to categorize nouns in the L2. The third experiment - a forced-choice article elicitation task - shows that the mass-count distinction is one of a number of factors that determine article choice, along with definiteness, specificity and plural marking. The weight given to each of these factors can vary from individual to individual. A final, corpus-based study of the distribution of article-NP combinations in native English usage (established through a search of the British National Corpus) suggests that the frequency of such combinations may also be a factor in determining article use by Japanese L2 speakers. It is concluded that the use of English articles by L2 speakers from an article-less L1 like Japanese is intricate, but not random, and can be explained by combinations of factors that are theoretically motivated.

This study presents research into the types of questions and tasks that accompany the reading texts in four global EFL coursebooks and their revised editions: Cutting Edge, English File, Headway and Inside Out. The rationale for undertaking such an investigation is the crucial role reading and questions play both in learning per se and language learning in particular and the still dominant place textbooks hold in many classrooms. I created a taxonomy of five different pre-reading question-types and eight different types of post-reading comprehension questions grouped into three categories of content, language and affect. I then applied this taxonomy to the questions and tasks accompanying the reading activities in the coursebooks in this study. I analysed the distribution of the question-types in terms of frequency, (measuring how many of each question-type is asked), occurrence, (measuring presence or not of question-types in a given reading, regardless of frequency) and range (measuring how many different question-types occur in any given text, edition or series) that is, how many out of the five possible pre-reading question-types and how many of the eight possible comprehension question-types are used in any reading, irrespective of how many or which type. Across all ten coursebooks ill the study, the most widely used pre-reading question-types were activating schemata and pre-teaching vocabulary and the most widely used comprehension question-types were those that require inferential comprehension, although different series demonstrated their own preferences. In order to provide an informed discussion regarding these results, I held semi-structured interviews with the writers and editors of the series in this study, thus affording me an insight into the approaches and priorities these writers have when creating the reading skills sections of their coursebooks. I found that there is no systematic approach to writing these questions, the authors draw on their extensive experience in both teaching and materials writing.

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