It is argued in this thesis that, contrary to much previous work on the subject, the history of English Studies in higher education is not best understood in terms of the emergence of a mature form of academic activity which has since continued to develop through time on the basis of the unity of its object (lq`English literature') and of its mode of study (lq`literary criticism'). Instead, this history examines the conditions which allowed the initial emergence, specification and delimitation of the new academic discipline of `English Language and Literature', and the sequence of subsequent institutional and discursive modifications and transformations which brought about substantial alterations to the field of study. Through a series of case studies of the English Association, the Newbolt Report, the Review of English Studies, and of the diverse tendencies which have characterised the discipline since the nineteen-forties, it is argued that `English Studies' must be analysed as an entity not having any single or consistent fixed centre. It is further shown that within the variable discursive and institutional articulations which have characterised English Studies as a field of activity, account must be taken of a much wider range of objects and relations than can be encompassed within `literature' and `criticism'; in fact, the discipline is shown to have been just as concerned with, for example, approved modes of communication, and Englishness. The thesis examines the specific historical conditions under which such objects and issues were brought into mutual relation through the establishment of full academic disciplinary status, the installation of an integrated career structure and professional norms, and the development of a distinctive documentary field, set of professional associations, range of pedagogic activities, and mechanism for the selection of students.

This research investigates the writing of EFL university students at the English department of a major university in Syria. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical framework, the study applies Thematic analysis to students’ exam essays across two disciplines: language and literature, with the aim of exploring the differences in the language choices that students make in meeting the relevant disciplinary requirements. Another aspect of the study is to analyse student writing across different academic level with a view to identifying the nature of students’ developing writing maturity. Based on the assumption of an existing strong connection between the text and the broader context, the research investigates the possible influence of other contextual factors including the essay questions, model essays from the textbooks, and teacher’s views and perceptions. The findings from Thematic analysis point to the importance of interpersonal meaning in understanding this across-disciplinary variation in terms of building the argument and answering the essay question. The research shows potential pedagogical benefits in raising students’ awareness to the important function of different linguistic choices, particularly those with Thematic positions, in achieving the purpose of the text.

Increasing numbers of Vietnamese students write in English as a foreign language for university and employment purposes. This research study explored the writing of ten higher education students in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. In the first of its kind in Vietnam, the study establishes the types of writing or genres, in English, that participants had undertaken over their life course. Although participants reported a significant standardisation of genres at lower levels of education, they had been expected to produce a wider range of genres at either undergraduate or MA level, or for employment purposes. This included the need to write for research, science and business purposes. Participants were generally ill-prepared to take on these writing challenges. The findings indicate that a form of genre needs-analysis and genre pedagogy at undergraduate level could be implemented to support English language teachers and students to scaffold writing activities and to help prepare graduates for the type of writing expected of them within MA-level courses and employment. The participants valued assignments and writing that helped them to develop their thinking; they appreciated learning to write in a way that would be useful for employment and academic study and were motivated by gaining high scores and receiving positive feedback from teachers. Having the opportunity to write about familiar topics in a more creative way was also highly regarded. Participants felt they had experienced challenges when they first engaged in critical thinking, when they had to brainstorm for ideas and when they wrote introductions. During writing activities, participants positioned themselves and their arguments as Vietnamese citizens with a sense of pride and loyalty to their national identity. Participants were audience aware and used only material that would be deemed socially and politically correct within Vietnam. Many features of the sociocultural context played a role in the genres participants had written, the writing processes they engaged in and their perceptions of writing activities. The prevalence of English as a lingua franca and international research-writing conventions were evident. Traditional teaching approaches and grammar-based assessment and testing practices within Vietnam also featured significantly in participant’s experiences of writing in English. These structural forces, as well as other historical, cultural and political realities presented themselves more evidently than personal or idiographic in the writing experiences and writing processes of the participants.

English speaking is arguably the most problematic aspect for adult learners in Taiwanese EFL environments. The gap between the curricular objectives and the results of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) indicates that younger generations outrun college students in learning to speak English. Moreover, the exchangeable use of terms such as English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reveals the conceptualization of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) which assumes that learners learn to speak the target language in a naturally occurring language environment. This is manifested in Language Learning Strategy (LLS) theories focusing on communication/compensation strategies. However, the initial pursuit of ‘universally effective’ LLS has been called into question and there is a need for the contextualization of LLS research. To begin with, this study differentiates the concept of ESL and EFL in order to unravel the hidden assumption of SLA/LLS. Next, in adopting a sociocultural-ecological perspective, strategies for learning to speak English are considered as niches rather than fixed entities presented in mainstream LLS survey research. Specifically, because this study aims at depicting five non-English majors’ qualitatively different ways of perceiving and experiencing in their local environment (i.e., their constructed reality), phenomenography is used to examine the person-environment relationships. Lastly, qualitatively different SLSEs will be discussed in hopes of facilitating a more reflective way of learning to speak in EFL environments.

The main purpose of this case study research was to find an appropriate way to enhance listening comprehension ability through self-access materials for a group of less-skilled university language learners in Thailand. The study was conducted in three phases: the exploratory, the material development and the main study. The participants of the exploratory study were ten good EFL listeners completing a set of three standardized listening comprehension test tasks. Stimulated recall protocol was undertaken in order to manifest strategy use in a listening comprehension process. The participants of the main study were fourteen less-skilled first-year university students who learned listening skills and strategies in a self-access learning way through self-access materials especially adapted to support their learning for a period of 12-14 weeks before taking a posttest. The findings from qualitative data analysis revealed that good EFL learners effectively orchestrated various metacognitive and cognitive strategies in three stages of pre, while and post listening in a listening comprehension process manifesting their underlying language proficiency. Contrary to the good EFL listeners, the results indicated that less-skilled learners used less listening strategies and were unable to use them as successfully as good EFL listeners did. Based on the findings from the third phase, the quantitative result of Wilcoxon signed-ranks test unveiled that there was a significant difference between the pre and posttests mean scores at the 0.001 level. The result was further supported by the recall qualitative analysis indicating that the less-skilled participants employed a greater amount of metacognitive and cognitive strategy use after the self-access learning process. In their learning diaries, the less-skilled participants further reported an increase of posttest scores, giving reasons for the improvement that listening skills, strategies and practice through self-access materials helped them become better listeners. The findings from questionnaire and learning diary in terms of attitudes towards self-access learning and materials showed that there was a positive attitude towards the self-access materials and learning in a self-instruction way. Almost all of them reported that they had more confidence to learn independently and liked self-access learning more than the past. The research findings shed a light on how to support EFL learners not only to become better listeners but also to become autonomous language learners.

This research was conducted for the purpose of assessing the practicality of introducing the Discourse Intonation theory in the Language Institute of Al-Baath University, Syria. Using a case study tradition, the various features of the theory were presented over a number of sessions, thus providing the participants of the study, being advanced teacher-learners, with a thorough treatment of these features for the purpose of examining their cognitive and affective reception of each of these features. The final purpose was to see if these participants would be able to pedagogically deal with these features and find them relevant to their own self-development, as well as to see if the Discourse Intonation theory is seen, from a teaching point of view, to have a place at the Language Centre. The results were encouraging. When the participants sat the course, they found it difficult sometimes to grasp some of the rules, and they also encountered some occasional difficulty in doing listening and speaking tasks, although this difficulty was not consistent, and often differed from one feature to the other. Although the participants managed to demonstrate at least a basic understanding of the rules stated in the course, they were less consistent in their ability to explicitly describe how the new rules would relate to the English language in general terms. However, the findings were promising because they contained evidence to the effect that the participants‘ thinking of intonation was stimulated, and their critical reception of DI meant that they had already taken the first step towards actively benefiting from the course, thus redefining the meaning of ‗benefit‘ when it comes to instruction on intonation. This optimism is further supported by the fact that three participants thought that the theory would deserve a place for an explicit treatment at Language Institute. This is implied by the various recommendations that the participants suggested for successfully approaching the teaching of Discourse Intonation. The suggested approach, characterized by anticipating learning difficulties and thinking of solutions, indicates an actively critical perspective and a wellinformed position which, with its positive evaluation of the place of this theory in pedagogy, shows advances on the many negative teacher attitudes expressed in the literature. The research, departing from these findings, offered some suggestions for both further teaching and further research on the teachability of Discourse Intonation, in the hope of having gone a step further in our understanding of the relationship of Discourse Intonation to pedagogy.

This mixed-methods research aims to explore two aspects of student motivation in the Taiwanese senior-high-school context. Firstly, it investigates students’ motivational orientations for studying English after the education reform policies were launched in 2002. Secondly, it examines the fluctuating nature of student motivation and the perceived motivational factors which might cause changes in motivation. As well as this, the present study attempts to compare and contrast student motivation in different school grades (year one versus year three). This study employed a three-phase sequential exploratory mixed-methods design, with a combination of prioritized qualitative and supplementary quantitative research approaches to studying L2 motivation. The semi-structured interview guide and the item pool of the questionnaire were developed through four preliminary interviews in Phase One. Qualitative data were gathered through the interview study in Phase Two by conducting 33 individual interviews with 26 students and seven English teachers in one local senior high school in southern Taiwan. The preliminary analysis of the interview data was then used to modify and finalize the questionnaire distributed in the survey in Phase Three. A total of 428 senior-high-school students in grade one/three responded to the questionnaire which was designed to describe motivational features and motivational changes of a bigger student sample under investigation. The research results reveal that the majority of students study English because of instrumental orientation. There is no major difference between first- and third-grade students in light of seven classifications of L2 motivation. Gardner’s modified concept of integrativeness can be applicable to Taiwanese senior-high-school students today. Also, the recently-proposed L2 Motivational Self System by Dörnyei can explain student motivation through a self perspective to a great extent. Based on the questionnaire reports, the ideal L2 self shows the least significant difference between male and female students involved in the study. In addition, the ought-to L2 self found in this study presents some local features which are different from its original theoretical concept. As for changes in motivation, the research findings indicate a variety of motivational factors with diverse influences on the students’motivation when they learn English in senior high school, such as teachers, parents, peers, exams, test scores, social encounters with foreigners, learning experience, and the development of future goals. Another major finding shows that exams exert a rather complex influence on student motivation in the Taiwanese senior-high-school context.

The value of using literature in the language classroom has attracted a renewed interest and attention in the ELT community in the last few decades. Major justifications for using literature with language learners include valuable authentic and motivating material, language and cultural enrichment, as well as personal growth and involvement. However, in Taiwanese higher education, literature is often kept off the majority of university English courses and reserved only for advanced literary courses for English majors. Non-English majors are seldom provided with opportunities to learn the target language through literary texts because literature is often considered too difficult or impractical for them. To help these EFL students tap the power and potential of literature in English language learning, this study brings together literature and cooperative pedagogy to design a literature-focused cooperative learning (LFCL) project, in which students work in cooperative groups, inside or outside the classroom, to complete a variety of cooperative language learning tasks appropriate to each stage of the reading of a literary work of fiction. This project was applied to my ten-month, two-semester actual teaching of three groups of non-English majors to explore the effects of such integration holistically in terms of student experiences and perceptions, motivation, learning processes and outcomes.

Tronco Comun Universitario Inglés (TCUI) of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) in central Mexico is the context where this research originally developed. TCUI is the academic body responsible for the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to all undergraduate students of the BUAP. BUAP consists of seven Unidades Regionales (Regional Branches) which are spread across the state of Puebla, making it one of the largest and most highly populated universities in the country. Administratively, BUAP consists of seven Divisiones de Estudios Superiores (DES) ― groups of departments sharing common academic roots. Each DES of the BUAP is made of Faculties, Schools and Institutes, each with their own interests and objectives. TCUI exists in every single Faculty, School or Institute of the BUAP, making English a common subject for every student.

No description available.