This multiple ethnographic case studies aims to investigate the critical literacy which emerged and emanated in the Chinese classrooms using drama as pedagogy. Drawing on the perspectives of Critical theories, Bakhtin Mikhail's dialogism, and also the literatures on critical literacy, this study argues that there is disparity of statuses of languages, knowledges, cultures and peoples within the Chinese language classrooms. Considering that indoctrinated teaching, official Chinese language and functional literacy are deeply ingrained within Chinese education, this study explore the efficacy of drama to promote pupils' voices and transform the Chinese language education. Concepts grounded in dialogism such as habitus, anwerability, voice, carnival were applied to constitute a theoretical frame for data analysis. Finally, six Chinese classrooms were selected as cases for in-depth discussion. It was found that there was an absence of dichotomous practice of critical dialogical literacy when drama was used. Instead, shades of grey of criticality and dialogicality were identified within those case study classrooms, showing that the dynamic and intricate power relations between pupils and teachers, as well as the interplay between the official language, culture, knowledge and habitus and those of the unofficial. The results also revealed that the more drama was applied in the classroom, more lively and carnivalesque the classroom was, and hence a higher degree of criticality and dialogicality. It was found that drama allows pupils to participate and create their learning content and environment. In addition to the use of drama, the use of space, the classroom order, the teaching materials, the classroom talk and discussion, the pupils' bodily response all are crucial for giving rise to a dialogic space for drama to take place. All these elements worked as the integral architectonics which affected the emergence and development of pupils' voices.

This thesis examines the relation between figures of paradise and the ideologies and economies of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, arguing that paradise myth is the product of a value-laden discourse related to profit, labour, and exploitation of resources, both human and environmental, which evolves in response to differing material conditions and discursive agendas. The literature of imperialism and conquest abounds with representations of colonies as potential gold-lands to be mined materially or discursively: from the EI Dorado of the New World and the 'infernal paradise' of Mexico, to the 'Golden Ophir' of Africa and the 'paradise of dharma' of Ceylon. Most postcolonial analyses of paradise discourse have focused exclusively on the Caribbean or the South Pacific, failing to acknowledge the appearance of fantasies of paradise in association with Africa and Asia. Therefore, my thesis not only performs a comparative reading of marginalized paradisal topoi and tropes related to Mexico, Zanzibar, and Ceylon, but also uncovers literature from these regions which has been overlooked in mainstream postcolonial .criticism, mapping the circulations, continuities, and reconfigurations of the paradise myth as it travels across colonie{and continents, empires and ideologies. My analysis of these three regions is divided into six chapters, the first of each section excavating colonial uses ofthe paradise myth and constructing its genealogy for that particular region, the second investigating revisionary uses of the motif by postcolonial writers including Malcolm Lowry, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. I address imperialist discourse from outside the country in conjunction with discourse from within the independent nation in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a literal topos motivating European exploration and colonization, develops into an ideological myth justifying imperial praxis and economic exploitation, and [mally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary postcolonial writers to challenge colonial representations and criticize neocolonial conditions.

Previously, research on multinational teamwork with various nationalities and cultures involved, which looked at the aspect of communication, was largely based on the examination of specific facilitators and barriers to its communication (i.e. Watson, et al., 1993; Hofner Saphiere, 1996). There it was found that multinational teams might have specific communication facilitators dependent upon the cultures involved. This is reflected in the theoretical development in the field of intercultural management, which gives guidance for culturally complex team settings (i.e. Trompenaars, 1993). The complexity managers’ face is increasing further through China’s involvement in the implementation of globalization strategies (Podsiadlowski, 2002). Recently, the relevance of China’s involvement has been increasing for Germany, in particular given Chinese companies’ investments in Germany. Therefore, the study of various nationalities in one research project has been reconsidered and currently there is new demand for studies, which seek to understand the complexity of Sino-German teamwork (Podsiadlowski, 2002). However, besides non-research based literature, research focusing solely on Sino-German teamwork occupies a marginal place (i.e. Podsiadlowski, 2002). Additionally, much of the multinational team research (for example, Watson, et al., 1993) looked at outcomes and disregarded the team members’ experience itself by using quantitative methods. It provided an understanding influenced by positivistic perspectives, saying that certain factors are pre-conditions for successful team communication. This study recognized these positions, but questioned the positivist bias demonstrated there. Throughout this research, associated factors were understood as being non-linear and interrelated, representing the complexity managers are experiencing. As a result this study argued that Chinese and Germans working in teams were marginalised in the intercultural management research field until today and their needs were not addressed by much of the existing research. These led to my conclusion that there is a need to conduct research that for the first time is informed by a postmodern theoretical framework that seeks to privilege multiplicity and diversity and that also attends to the silences surrounding this group. Therefore, a postmodern framework provided the theoretical lens through which this research, and its authorial, methodological, and interpretive characteristics were construed and represented. This perspective emphasised local stories about experiences, attended to ‘difference’, was concerned with the multiple nature of ‘reality’, and recognised the importance of language as a medium for the social construction of what may be considered ‘truth’ (Cheek, 2000). Narrative inquiry represented in this thesis the postmodern epistemological framework to understand subjective experiences by exploring the stories of twelve Chinese and German participants and the meanings derived from these. These stories were themselves experiences structured and recalled inside wider cultural and social contexts (Kirkman, 2002; Webster & Mertova, 2007). The socio-cultural contexts were woven into the language used by the participants to explain their experiences and signified the meanings of these experiences. However, Chinese and Germans not only differed with regards to language and language variety, but also with respect to their patterns of usage and how meaning was generated in interactive situations on the basis of socio-cultural knowledge. Therefore, my narrative inquiry took into account both linguistic and sociocultural aspects and addressed the relations between interactive communication strategies and larger social and cultural phenomena. Within the context presented above, the focus and contribution of this study were the descriptions of the intercultural communication experiences of members of Sino- German teams and the analysis of factors relating to interferences in communication to provide a thicker explanation of communication interferences in intercultural communication, where theoretical attempts so far remained rather fragmented, and to contribute findings from different perspectives on what has traditionally been viewed from a positivistic standpoint. Through sharing the participants’ lived experiences of working and communicating with Chinese and Germans and vice versa, a number of linguistic and socio-cultural factors influencing communication behaviour and causing interferences were uncovered. The factors identified from the study resonate with a number of factors previously established in existing multinational teamwork research and whilst others contributed new information that adds to the understandings of the meanings that may be made from such experience of communication interferences. Comparing the experiences related by Chinese participants with those related by German participants showed a substantial consensus with regards to the communication interferences experienced in Sino-German teams and the factors relating to these interferences, as well as observable differences in communication behaviours. The lack of foreign language proficiency on the side of both Chinese and German individuals was stated as being a major factor for communication interferences that was further enhanced through the strong linguistic barrier between these two languages. Good language proficiency minimises the occurrence of misunderstandings and miscommunications. It allows better personal contact between the team members since it better enables people to establish personal contacts and relationships, as well as to use an interlinked communication structure that allows informal communication and therefore compliance with the Chinese cultural ‘rules of the game’. However, foreign language proficiency alone is not a guarantee for successful intercultural communication in Sino-German teams. This study also analysed, in addition to the practical and theoretical significance of language and language skills, the cultural influences on the communication between Chinese and German team members. Many participants were either unaware (especially on the German side) or only partially aware of the fact that differences in communication behaviour are based on different culture-specific communication conventions and strategies. It was found that intercultural awareness on the part of individuals in a team, meaning the knowledge and awareness of culture-specific conventions and norms, had a positive influence on communication within the team. Knowledge of the meaning of the two key terms mianzi and guanxi plays an important role in Sino-German teams. On the other hand, an ethnocentric perspective on either one or both sides inevitably results in mutual negative attributions. This findings added to the understanding how this communication could be improved and, most importantly, as a prerequisite for actions of any kind to achieve improvements, to draw the attention of German team members to the relevance of communication when working with their Chinese colleagues and vice versa. Furthermore, the study functioned as an act of empowerment, a way to give voice to managers and team members who were methodologically not heard.

This thesis attempts to investigate the structure of Libyan Arabic discourse in general and interviews as a text-genre text-form in particular. This investigation includes conjunctions and their influence on the cohesion of interviews and certain other textual phenomena, i.e. repetition, parallelism and their unequivocal significance in text cohesion. To this effect, random samples were taken from two Libyan Arabic interviews, i.e. sample text 1 and sample text 2 to who how the structure of these texts is made up. To achieve these objectives, this study uses a semantic, structural and pragma-semio-textual approach to analyse and then translate the texts chosen, as language in this study is considered to be a form of behaviour (Halliday 1973) that cannot be studied in isolation from its social, cultural and contextual contexts in which it is used. Our textual analysis has shown interesting results. First, interviews have their own generic structure and such structure is presented in specific stages. Second, interviews favour the cohesive type of lexical repetition not only for cohesion purposes but also for persuasive functions as well. Third, interviews use many parallel constructions for conviction and persuasive functions.

Since language is an important means of communication between human beings, it is held that writers or speakers can affect their readers or hearers by using certain linguistic means. The manipulation of semantics and syntax, namely the use of emotive language, is seen as an affective means resorted to by text producers to influence the people's acceptance of the truth. Emotional language aims ultimately at persuading the addressee to accept the facts as they are presented by writers. It is regarded as a necessary condition for persuasion to be successful. This is due to the persuasive force of emotive meaning exerted upon the receiver. In addition, the employment of emotive language may be attributed to ideological considerations. This will be demonstrated in Chapter II. Emotiveness, as a means of persuasion, can be expressed by using certain devices such as repetition, intertextuality, word-order, figures of speech, intensifiers ... etc. These strategies will be discussed in detail with reference to translation in Chapter III. Furthermore, I must say that some of my remarks have been based on the findings of outstanding grammarians and linguists, and therefore, I have been obliged to quote from such works to substantiate my points of view. Before proceeding with the investigation, I must point out that the entire data of my work will be confined only to news reports and editorials both in Arabic and English, and for this end a number of articles have been used from official newspapers in both languages.

The thesis argues that through the portrayal of a sequence of authors-as-protagonists who write from within the apartheid andpost-apartheid condition, the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee engages with the 'paradox of postcolonial authorship'. Whilst striving symbolically to retrieve the lost and silenced histories of colonised Others, writers of conscience (or conscience-stricken writers) risk re-enacting the very authority they seek to challenge. Taking account of Coetzee's recent material and adding to ongoing debates, the research traces the non-systematic shifts and transitions in the corpus in which Coetzee rehearses and revises his understanding of the ethics of intellectualism in parallel with the emergence of the 'new South Africa'. The thesis identifies three general tendencies in the trajectory of the work. Firstly, the early fiction is read within Coetzee's project of 'demythologising history' as a means of laying bare the 'madness of civilisation' and thereby exposing colonialist history as another ideologically inflected discourse. The middle phase engages with debates about the limits of representing the racial Other. Through the dialectical motifs of speech and silence, Coetzee attempts to bridge the impasse of postcolonial authorship: the racial Others in these novels are both silenced by oppression and silent in resistance. Finally, published on the cusp of regime change, and then postapartheid, the later novels are read as confessions in which the figure of the angstridden and dislocated white writer strives for persoflal nc1 historit tut(' d reconciliation'. The trajectory of the oeuvre crystallises notions of ethical writing practices, sparely portrayed in the sequence of meta-generic 'Costello lectures'. The academic and novelist Elizabeth Costello endorses notions of feeling and sentiment ("heart-speech") over and above the discourses of reason and rationality, thereby developing Coetzee's concern with the formulation of the private speaking to and informing the public sphere. The thesis assesses how successfully, as a member of a white academic elite in South Africa, Coetzee accommodates his various roles as author, public intellectual and citizen (or private individual with both rights, and obligations to society). Overturning Edward Said's formulation of the public intellectual 'speaking truth to power', Coetzee is sceptical about what constitutes 'truth' and refuses to take confrontational positions. Yet, by withdrawing from the public domain as he makes interventions (speaking through Elizabeth Costello, for instance), Coetzee self-consciously problematises his own position (what he might call a 'nonposition'), lending weight to the claim that he is politically evasive.

This thesis is intended to be a comparative approach to Chinese theories of the literary symbolic by way of a comprehensive investigation of the term xing [Chinese symbol]. The xing has a long history of over two thousand years, is capable of protean meanings and generally considered very confusing. In the Introduction of the present work, a historical review of the study of the xing provides a map of the terrain in this area. Following this, a discussion of methodology is unfolded and suggestions are made that the general aim of this thesis is not to search for a "true" or "essential" meaning of the xing, but to examine how the word has actually been used in Chinese literary studies and to explore as much as possible its explicit and potential meanings. The ideal way of approaching an issue of this nature, the thesis suggests, would be a four-fold one, namely, the historical, descriptive, analytical and comparative approach. In this study, comparative approach is in the predominant position. The first part is designed to reveal the meanings of the xing and a number of other relevant terms. Through a descriptive analysis of the statements by major critics in various historical periods and by invoking Western theories of literature, the thesis discusses the multiple meanings of the xing, the intrinsic relationship between these meanings and the nature of poetic creation which underlies them. In the second part, a contour is drawn to demonstrate the mainstreams of Western theories of symbolism from Romanticism to Modernism. A number of important critics, such as Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mallarme and T. S. Eliot, are discussed and analysed, thus preparing the ground for an all-round comparison. The comparative study in this work is conducted in two ways: 1) Western theories of symbolism are applied to the interpretation of Chinese concepts and 2) Examples are presented to demonstrate the amazing similarities in the way Chinese and Western critics deal with the issue of the literary symbolic, so as to attain a better understanding of both. The xing not only has multiple meanings but its meanings also work on different levels. Hence, the comparison has to be a three dimensional one: xing is compared and contrasted with fu and bi, and these three terms are compared with parallel Western notions of sign, allegory and symbol; moreover, these comparisons are made on four levels - as rhetorical devices, as modes of writing, as aesthetic tendencies and as modes of interpretation. In the concluding chapter, a summary is given highlighting several major points at which the East and the West come closest and an attempt is made to reveal the underlying theoretical reasons.

The present study was conducted to investigate possible interpretation discourse level effects of processing instruction and re-exposure to processing instruction on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Japanese linguistics system: namely Japanese passive forms. Processing instruction is a type of focus on form which is framed around the input processing theoretical framework. In order to carry out this investigation two separate experimental studies were conducted. All participants were native English speakers and were randomly assigned to two groups. In both experimental studies, one group received processing instruction which involved an explicit instruction component and structured input practice directed at altering the way L2 learners process input; the other group was used as a control group and received no instruction. Interpretation and production sentence level tasks, and discourse level tasks were used to measure performance after a one day instruction. A pre-test/post-test design was adopted to collect data in both studies. In the second experimental study, the processing instruction group received a re-exposure treatment between the post-test and the delayed post-test. Based on previous research carried out on the effectiveness of processing instruction, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted and produced sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A further hypothesis was that the effects of re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment (after the first post-test) would further improve subjects ability to interpret and produce sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A set of two hypotheses were formulated on possible interpretation discourse effects for processing instruction. It was hypothesised that the group receiving processing instruction would improve in its ability to interpret discourse (guided recall: dialogue and story version) containing Japanese passive forms, and that learners in this group, receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment would further improve in their ability to interpret discourse containing Japanese passive forms. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the raw scores of all the measures used supported the four hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide clear evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Japanese passive construction. The present study showed that processing instruction was successful in altering the way in which learners processed the input and its effects had also an impact on the way learners produced Japanese passive construction forms. The main findings of the present study also provided new evidence on the effectiveness of processing instruction in improving learners’ performance on interpretation discourse level tasks. In addition to this, it also provides new evidence that learners receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment between a post-test and a delayed post-test can further improve in their ability to interpret and produce the target feature at sentence level and interpret the target feature at discourse level. The results obtained in the two studies have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this research provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction on the acquisition of a different linguistic feature of the Japanese grammar system (passive forms), not only on an interpretation and production sentence level task but also on an interpretation discourse level task. It also demonstrated the important role of a re-exposure instructional treatment.

The main purpose of this study is to examine a popular Thai genre of the novel, romance fiction, with a focus on the modes of subjectivity and discourses of femininity and masculinity to be found in Thai romance novels between the 1940s and 1990s. The thesis also seeks to locate the various socio-cultural contexts of Thai society, which influence the constitution of Thai gender relations and the transformation of gender norms. Additionally, it attempts to address the issue of the usefulness of Western theories of gender and romance, which are widely regarded in Thailand as tools of Westernization and new forms of colonialism. This study suggests that Thai gender relations are complicated, since there are several disparate aspects that influence the constitution of male and female subjectivity. Western influence is one of these aspects that help define femininity and masculinity, while domestic beliefs also play a salient role as palimpsests that are not easily erased. Thus, the representation of various modes of gendered subjectivity in romance fiction concurrently indicates both changes in and the reproduction of discourses that define an „essence‟ of gender identity that accords with traditional Thai cultural beliefs including the deep-rooted idea that the primary purpose of writing is didactic.

This is a thesis in variationist sociolinguistics. It attempts to make a contribution to the study of a dialect of Arabic—Palestinian Arabic—spoken in a region where the population is gradually becoming engulfed in a language, which was once quite similar to Arabic, namely Hebrew, but has undergone drastic changes, particularly in its phonological structure, as a result of contact with European languages. Now, Modern Hebrew is acting as a colonizing language vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabic, and in this study we are exploring the effects the contact between the two languages on the phonology of Arabic in the town of Jaffa, where Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews reside, perhaps not in harmony, but nonetheless in the same urban space. Employing quantitative methods for one linguistic variable and a sociohistorical analysis for another, we make the case that the two variables observed in this study are but a fragment of the entire complex. Examples from the data collected are provided and briefly analyzed, some of which are from other domains of the language, and these will be further explored at a later date.