Over the last two decades, research has exposed the need for new responses to English in various regions of the world, raising many critical issues. Recent English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)-oriented research deals with English in Asian contexts; however there seems to be insufficient research related to South Korea and, especially, Korean postgraduate-level students’ orientations to English. To help address this gap, this PhD thesis reports research into changes to South Korean postgraduate students’ use of and feelings about English during their study abroad in the UK. Explorations and discussions of the findings of this study shed light on the students’ orientations and attitudes to English before coming to the UK, how their attitudes and beliefs adjusted over the course of an academic year, and the factors that played a part in these changes. This research produces a comprehensive study of Korean postgraduate students using English in a multilingual but also native English language setting and reveals how the students oriented themselves to English in Korea, how useful their English preparation was before arrival in the UK, how they feel about their English, and what influenced the evolution of their perspectives over time. Importantly, the findings of the study suggest that the experience of living and studying in the UK had an impact on the participants’ attitudes and orientations towards English and their language use; among numerous other effects, a move away from norm-dependence in general, and in particular increasing awareness of the existence of different English varieties, were widely evidenced. The results give rise to new potential avenues for research into language attitudes and provide a deeper understanding of language(s) and language users in the field of English as a lingua franca in this previously unexplored context.

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The research aims to provide an alternative working methodology from the perspective of a contemporary Chinese artist, not a calligrapher, to answer the research question: how does one create new works of calligraphy an art so burdened with historical tradition? This is practice based research; the designed pattern of study aims to test and to exemplify the relationship, and also most importantly based on the nature of the investigation and practical necessity, the strategy of the research project is implemented in a dialectical construction as the title of the thesis suggests.

This thesis concerns an exploratory practice (EP) project conducted at a two-year college in north east Japan, which was severely affected by the earthquake of March 2011. The focus of research is a 13-week EFL course for 25 first-year college students, specifically designed to enhance their future visions of themselves as L2 users (Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014). This study examined opportunities that the course created for the students’ vision development in the classroom and the factors that may have contributed to these opportunities. The data came from 1) students’ written narratives, 2) semi-structured interviews, 3) teacher/researcher reflections, field notes and audio- and video- recordings of the classes, and 4) course evaluation questionnaires. Findings show that the course was beneficial for enhancing students’ appreciation of their language-relevant futures and the thesis engages with the factors that contributed to these findings by 1) tracing the trajectories of L2 learning and intercultural experiences of selected interview participants, 2) examining group dynamics and pedagogy adopted for the course, and 3) piecing together an understanding of the role that the teacher played in mobilising one focal participant’s future vision. The key contribution of this EP inquiry turned out to be more far-reaching than originally envisaged; however, pointing to the broader role that language education can play in young people’s lives. The thesis concludes by discussing educational and research consequences of this finding.

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The main aim of this study was to explore whether or not low achievers in EFL at a Japanese university perceive peer cooperation in cooperative learning contexts to be effective in improving their levels of expectancy, motivation and ultimate attainment in the L2. The main findings in this study pertain to the relationship between peer cooperation and L2 classroom motivation. The relationship involved several perceived routes which mainly indicated that the learners felt that peer cooperation had had a positive influence on their levels of motivation. The perceived routes linking peer cooperation to motivation can be roughly divided into two types; 1) the two routes which were mainly focused on in this study: through expectancy alone or a combination of levels of English and expectancy; and 2) other routes identified during the course of the study: through group cohesion and/or cohesion-generated factors (a sense of responsibility for their peers and having fun in class) or through factors related to status ordering or hierarchy among students (feelings of superiority/inferiority to their peers).

Thèse : Göteborg, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 233-253.

The research is a hermeneutic-cum-semiotic approach to the study of the translatability of religious language in a secular play, using The Merchant of Venice in China as a reference. Under the ”power turn” or “political turn” in translation studies, omissions and untranslatability of religious material are often seen as the product of censorship or self-censorship in the prevalent socio-political context. But the theology of each individual translating agent is often neglected as an important contributing factor to such untranslatability. This thesis offers a comprehensive approach in tracing the hermeneutical process of the translators/directors as a reader and the situational process and semiotics of theatre translation, which altogether gives rise to the image of translated literature which in turn influences audience reception. This interdisciplinary study thus traverses the disciplines of translation studies, hermeneutics, theatre studies, and sociology. In this thesis I argue that while translation theorists under the current “sociological turn” view social factors as the overarching factors in determining translation activities and strategies, I will show how the interaction between the translator’s or the dramatist’s theology and religious values interact with the socio-cultural milieu to carve out a unique drama production. Often, as one can see from my case studies, it is the religious values of the translating agents that become the overarching factor in determining the translation product, rather than social factors. This thesis further argues that the translatability of religious discourse should be understood in a broader sense according to the seven dimensions proposed by Ninian Smart, rather than merely focusing on untranslatability as a result of semantic and linguistic differences.

Today many Middle Eastern states are experiencing political violence, either in the form of foreign occupation, civil war, revolution or coup d’état. This regional violence is not dissociated from international politics. In fact many foreign states are directly involved through influencing, financing or manipulating the situation, and have subsequently been the target of violent attacks themselves. Responding to this situation, a plethora of academic and artistic output concerning Middle Eastern terrorism has emerged from the West. These efforts, especially in English-language fiction, have been mainly reductive and simplistic and have contributed to furthering an atmosphere of mistrust and Islamophobia that emerged after 9/11. Yet in the decade following 9/11 little attention has been given to Middle Eastern writers who have been treating the subject of political violence in their own fiction and whose works are available in a variety of languages. This thesis analyzes five Middle Eastern novels that depict major regional conflict zones. Alaa Al-Aswany, Orhan Pamuk, Assaf Gavron, Yasmina Khadra, and Mohsin Hamid’s novels describe the nuances of their respective contexts: Egypt, Turkey, Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Pakistan. The following analyses highlight the complexity of Middle Eastern political violence and shed light on how these authors perceive or respond to Terrorism discourse in their fictions.

This thesis explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the speech of Chinese non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and native speakers (NSs), using corpus methodologies, the 'Linear Unit Grammar' analysis (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006) and text-based analyses. It reports that the DMs for analysis, 'like', 'oh', 'well', 'you know', 'I mean', 'you see', 'I think' and 'now', occur more frequently in the dialogic genres than in the monologic genres extracted from the three corpora, SECCL, MICASE and ICE-GB. The co-occurrence of DMs is taken as evidence to determine the categories for discussion with the suggested functions being secondary interpretations. Surprisingly, there are similarities in the use of DMs between Chinese NNSs and NSs. For the differences, some require NSs to become more tolerant and inclusive of the versions of English and some require pedagogical interventions for the Chinese NNSs. This thesis demonstrates that the use of DMs correlates with the genre, context, type of activity and identity of the speaker. All such factors affect the speakers' choice of a DM to use when giving priority to discourse organisation, fluency, the engagement of the listeners, the construction of the speaker‟s persona and the creation of solidarity.