This thesis aims to present and reflect on a collection of research that has informed and shaped pedagogical and andrological praxis across the two decades since pioneers launched the first online news sites onto the World Wide Web, thereby setting off what is frequently described as a revolution in journalism. It makes a case for revisiting core principles of systems thinking to develop a holistic approach to reflecting on changing journalistic realities. A critical systems heuristic is then operationalised to consider how the diverse work in this portfolio reconsiders journalistic parameters in newsroom, boardroom and classroom situations that are both distinct and interrelated. In doing so it illustrates how a commitment to social and cultural fluidity can enable researchers to constructively engage with role players inside and outside of academic interpretative communities. Furthermore, in its suggestions for further research this study adds its voice to other calls for journalism scholars to extend the boundaries of their concern beyond the academy and to generate insights that empower individuals and impact on industry - to the ultimate benefit of society.

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Background: Sentence Repetition (SR) is considered to be a good indicator of children’s grammatical knowledge. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that performance on SR improves with age, differentiates children with language difficulties, and shows relationships with other language assessments. However, there is debate about the underlying skills involved in SR with few studies directly investigating the impact of linguistic manipulation on SR performance. In the absence of standardized language assessments and lack of normative data, and building on evidence from typologically diverse languages, SR provides a potentially useful assessment tool in Arabic. Aims: (1) To examine the clinical utility of a novel SR test and an adapted Verbal Short Term Memory (VSTM) test by investigating the psychometric properties of the tests and their sensitivity to age and language ability. (2) To evaluate the contribution of established linguistic knowledge to immediate repetition by comparing the patterns of performance across different linguistic factors 3) To determine whether patterns of performance are similar or dissimilar across different age groups of Typically Developing children and different language ability groups. Methods: Three immediate repetition tests were developed or adapted: (1) a novel SR test targeting morphosyntactic structures of Arabic; (2) an adapted VSTM test based on the structure of the Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C; Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) with three subtests of Digit Recall, Word List Recall, and Nonword List Recall; and (3) an Anomalous Sentence Repetition (ASR) test including sets of Semantically Anomalous and Syntactically Anomalous sentences created from and matched to a subset of sentences in the SR test in target Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes as well as length. The SR and ASR tests were scored for the number of Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes repeated correctly. VSTM tests were scored based on the highest number of items repeated in correct order. The SR and VSTM tests were administered to Typically Developing Arabic-speaking children aged 2;6 to 5;11 (n = 140) and a Language Concerns group in the same age range (n = 16), matched on age and nonverbal IQ. The ASR test was only administered to participants older than 4 years. Results: The SR and VSTM tests were reliable, valid, and sensitive to age and language ability of participants. In the Typical sample a) Lexical Morphemes were easier to repeat than Grammatical Morphemes, (b) Digit span was higher than Word span and Word span was higher than Nonword span, and (c) Typical sentences were easier to repeat than Semantically Anomalous sentences followed by Syntactically Anomalous sentences. The gap between Digit and Word span, Grammatical and Lexical Morphemes in the SR test and Lexical Morphemes in Typical and Semantically Anomalous sentences showed a change with age. While performance was significantly reduced in the Language Concerns group, the profile of performance was largely similar. Like the younger children in the Typical sample, they showed a greater vulnerability in Grammatical Morphemes. Only four of 16 children in the clinical sample showed mismatches between their performance on the SR and VSTM tests. Conclusions: The study’s results are consistent with cross-linguistic evidence demonstrating that SR and VSTM tests are sensitive to developmental change and language difficulties and are informative about children’s language processing abilities. These findings lay the foundations for creating standardized assessments for Arabic-speaking preschool children.

This thesis examines professionalism of English language teaching (ELT) in one particular setting, the state of Kerala in southern India. It reveals that there is an independent and unrecognised professionalism amongst ELT professionals in the setting. This includes a lack of recognition of the efficacy of methods and approaches traditionally used in the setting and a lack of recognition of the informal professional development that is happening in the setting. This professionalism is unrecognised by local ELT professionals because of their belief in ‘Western TESOL’. I am only able recognise it when I learn, through an autoethnography of my own professionalism, to put aside my own preoccupations with ‘Western TESOL’. The initial objective of this study was to attempt to gain insights into local perspectives surrounding ELT methodology and teacher education, set against a background of a perceived need for methodological change in the setting. However, once the study had begun, it became clear that my own professional background and experiences, my ‘Western TESOL’ ‘professional baggage’, combined with the fact that I was coming into the setting as an outsider, seeing it through distant eyes, was affecting the ways in which I was viewing the setting and interpreting the events happening within it. As I began to offload some of this ‘professional baggage’, realising that my ‘Western TESOL’ understanding of the setting did not necessarily match local participants’ understandings of it, I began to question and re-evaluate the data I had collected. For example, I realised that I was focusing on what I saw as the negative aspects of what I was observing and being told about ELT in the setting, and comparing these to approaches to ELT in ‘Western TESOL’ settings that I was more familiar with. Over time, I began to look at these same aspects in a more positive light, seeing different perspectives and valuing what I was seeing or being told in different ways. My re-evaluations of the data from the setting over time also thus became a focus of the study. The study as a whole is therefore ethnographic in terms of attempting to understand local perspectives, using open-ended questionnaire, classroom observation, interview and field note data, with an autoethnographic dimension to acknowledge the influence of my own distant eyes perspective in understanding these local perspectives. It brings into focus how I, as a researcher, through re-evaluating my own data and as a result gaining greater insight into my own positioning, was able to give credit to different perspectives on the data collected, particularly the data from classroom observations and teacher accounts of practice, and in the light of this to offer possible ways forward for ELT in the setting. It has implications for local ELT professionals in terms of understanding and appreciating their own professionalism. It also has implications for TESOL professionals in unfamiliar settings in terms of the need to understand the complexity of these settings, rather than make hasty judgments about local practices, particularly in the case of ‘Western TESOL’ professionals working in ‘non-Western TESOL’ settings. It may therefore be of interest both to ‘Western’ teachers, teacher trainers and academics working or researching, or intending to work or carry out research, in settings with which they are not familiar, particularly ‘non-Western TESOL’ settings, and to local TESOL professionals and academics in the setting for the study.

This doctoral thesis explores the relationship between politics, Islam and the news media in the UK. Using the theory of mediatisation as a framework for understanding media power, it argues that the relationship between politics and the media cannot be fully appreciated without a consideration of the role of public relations practice within it. Drawing on Bourdieusian field theory, it utilises textual analysis and 31 semi-structured interviews with public relations practitioners, representatives of Muslim organisations and others with professional experience of Islam and the media to establish whether public relations can be understood as a distinct field, how it mediates between the political and journalistic fields and what the implications of this might be for Muslim organisations seeking to shape news media content.

This thesis examines interactions between science and the supernatural in Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy. The protagonist, whose aesthetic and philosophical starting point is naturalism, converts to Catholicism. This unusual conversion reflects social upheavals contemporary with Huysmans’s cycle of novels. In the late nineteenth century, science, emerging as symbol of new hope and salvation for humanity, has in a sense replaced religion. The Durtal cycle catalogues the disorders generated by this replacement, and represents the creation of a new order more suited to Durtal’s persona, through deconstruction of existing codes and beliefs. Thus is shaped the intellectual and aesthetic matrix of the four novels. Pathology is at the intersection of the interactions between science and the supernatural, the various components of which constitute the subject of the three substantive chapters of the thesis. Figuring social degeneration and the creation of imaginary medical worlds founded on contamination, Huysmans’s text explores the boundaries between science and religion, thus offering a new cosmogony constructed around a concept of mystic substitution associated with Catholicism. Analysis of these textual explorations is followed by a study of the body and the soul as the two primary principles contributing to the conflicts articulated in Huysmans’s work. The conversion processes to which the body and the soul are subjected help to build renewed relationships between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. Writing thus appears as the result of an alchemical quest in which opposites can ultimately be reunited. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the development of the novel form, subject to so many contradictory influences. The pharmaceutical quality – in Derridean terms – of writing ends this crisis and restores the author’s authority, making of the Durtal tetralogy a work that is characterised at one and the same time by its naturalism and by its mysticism.

A popular metaphor used by judges and journalists, the ‘chilling effect’ is used to describe the undesirable deterrence of legitimate free expression, although it is widely and loosely interpreted and rarely interrogated through methodical empirical research. This research examines the perceived chilling effect on freedom of expression in relation to defamation and privacy law and digital journalistic practice in England and Wales, over a five year period (2008-13). It examines media law in practice through interviews with legal specialists in defamation and privacy, close monitoring of online content, examination of court and policy documents, and surveys among journalists and online writers, and considers how decisions to publish or abandon stories are made in the contemporary networked news environment. The thesis finds that lawyers play an under-recognised but pivotal social role in the editorial gatekeeping process, enabling as well as restricting publication. Their absence in ill-resourced environments has a paradoxically constraining and liberating effect: a lack of legal advice and knowledge may lead to unnecessary censorship of particular stories, but at the same time small-scale operations without legal support and training may be less reactive to potential libel and privacy risks. Despite a popular perception of runaway privacy law, the findings indicate that libel was still a predominant concern for research participants and generated more threats and claims. The impact of defamation and privacy law on journalism, which is implied by the chilling effect metaphor, cannot be understood in isolation and a socio-legal approach based on empirical evidence is required to more fully expose the two-way interaction between law and journalism. Editorial decisions are subject to a complex web of competing factors; the collective or individual avoidance of stories can only be explained by looking at legal influences in their social context. In this way, hyperlocal bloggers may steer clear of particular topics for fear of social implications in local communities and national journalists can neglect stories as a result of organisational commercial pressures, or because such stories would damage their access to sources. The chilling effect descriptor is generally used to help direct policy and decisions that enhance freedom of expression in the public interest but debate is severely hampered by the lack of systematic research and data collection, as this thesis will show. Given the social complexity and ambiguity around perceived chilling effects, the thesis argues that this exercise would be informed by more detailed monitoring and analysis of specific contributory factors, such as individuals’ access to legal resources, legal knowledge and experience of direct or indirect threats of legal action. A more precise understanding of these elements in their wider social context would help the design of proportionate legal dispute mechanisms and the development of public legal education initiatives.

Children who have language disorder frequently have difficulties with vocabulary acquisition, and these difficulties often persist into adolescence. Language disorder is known to be associated with long-term influences on a range of academic, social, emotional, health, and employment outcomes. Phonological-semantic intervention has been shown to be effective in enhancing the vocabulary skills of children with language disorder in small-group or individual settings, but less is known about vocabulary interventions for adolescents with language disorder or interventions in whole-class models of delivery. This thesis undertook three strands of enquiry: a systematic review; a survey of teaching and speech and language therapy practice; and an experimental effectiveness study. The systematic review of the evidence regarding vocabulary intervention with adolescents confirmed that the use of a phonological-semantic approach in a universal model of delivery is under-researched in this age group. The survey of mainstream secondary school teachers and speech and language therapists showed that a phonological-semantic approach is frequently used by speech and language therapists but less often by teachers. The experimental study investigated the effectiveness of phonological-semantic vocabulary intervention, delivered by teachers and embedded into the secondary school curriculum in a whole-class model of delivery, for adolescents with language disorder. In the intervention study, 78 adolescents with language disorder aged 11 – 13 years were taught science curriculum words by teachers in class, under two conditions: 1) 10 words taught through usual teaching practice; and 2) 10 matched words taught using an experimental intervention incorporating phonological-semantic activities, embedded into the teaching of the syllabus. Ten matched control words received no intervention. Word knowledge was assessed at pre-intervention, post-intervention, and follow-up timepoints. The main findings of the study were that: the experimental classroom vocabulary intervention was more effective than usual teaching practice in increasing the word knowledge of participating students; there was a high degree of acceptability for the intervention activities amongst both students and teachers; and there were mixed preferences amongst students for whole-class, small-group, and individual models of intervention delivery. Clinical and teaching implications include the importance of intervening during the adolescent years, with classroom vocabulary intervention being a viable option for collaborative teacher and speech and language therapy practice.

UK Higher Education is considered to be at the forefront of equality and diversity policy and practice, yet its staff profile is characterised by persistent gender (among other types of) imbalance. This thesis investigates this paradox, focusing on the under-researched professional and support services staff, and particularly female-dominated administrative and secretarial occupations. In contrast to the few previous studies on the topic, this PhD project takes a discursive perspective to explore this paradox. In other words, it examines how university professional and support staff discursively account for the persistent gender imbalance in their sector, with a particular focus on how they talk themselves out of acting to change the status quo, i.e. on discursive barriers to change. A UK case-study university, whose staff gender-imbalanced profile is representative of the national picture, was selected as the epistemological site. Focus groups were conducted with female and male staff in administrative and secretarial occupations; interviews were carried out with managers who had progressed internally from administrative and secretarial roles, and with former employees of the case-study university. Data were analysed and interpreted from a critical realist, feminist perspective. Discourse analysis was conducted, with a specific focus on the functions, effects and implications of participants’ situated use of gendered discourses and discursive constructions, and co-production of patterned accounts. This thesis takes a much-needed step beyond deconstruction and critique of discursive barriers, towards promoting discursive reconstruction and change. It highlights participants’ potentially emancipatory uses of counter-discourses, and provides recommendations for discursive change.