Cultivating language learners’ willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) has been seen as the ultimate goal of L2 education and empirical inquiry into students’ intention to engage in L2 communication given the opportunity has gained momentum in applied linguistics research over the past decade or so. This strand of inquiry has seen a major shift from treating WTC as a relatively stable and fixed personality trait to taking a more context-sensitive perspective. In line with this shift, the present study set out to investigate the situated and emerging nature of L2 learners’ WTC in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in the Greek higher education setting. Adopting a ‘person-in context relational’ view of L2 motivation (Ushioda, 2009) as a theoretical and methodological lens for researching WTC, this qualitative multiple case study conducted over the period of one academic semester investigated L2 WTC of a diverse group of five first-year undergraduate students studying at a specific private higher education institution in Greece. Data came from ethnographic classroom observations, stimulated recall interviews, life story narratives, and follow-up interviews. While the findings have confirmed L2 WTC as a dynamic and complex construct, they have also added crucial new insights. The key amongst these is the notion that WTC must be understood as part of people’s larger meaning making practices. These unravel across lifespans and lifeworlds, occur in relationships with others, and, while not necessarily visible in the WTC moment, are always present in it. Thus, the present study has laid bare the consequences of adopting a person-in-context relational view of WTC in terms of what can be learned and what should be done about it in both research and practice.

This study is a classroom-based, mixed methods study into the influence of transcribing, reporting, and task repetition on in class student oral task performances. The study investigates two questions. First do students in an intact classroom improve task performances when they repeat the same task in subsequent performances? In a previous exploratory study by Moser (2008) students did not take advantage of task repetition opportunities to improve a repeat task performance. It was concluded that the reason for this was that amongst many students there was a lack of perceived pedagogical rationale for task repetition. On this point and more specifically the study investigates does a more transparent pedagogical focus realized through a transcribing phase or a reporting phase prior to a repeat task performance result in improved subsequent task performances. Related to this, and the second question of this study, is does the more intensive transcription work result in improved task performances than the reporting work? The results of the study reveal no significant difference between transcribing or reporting on subsequent task performances; however, there was significant results for a task repetition effect on task performances. The classroom implications of these findings will be discussed.

This is a textual study of seventeen Family 1 manuscripts in the Gospel of John: Gregory-Aland 1, 22, 118, 131, 205abs, 205, 209, 565, 872, 884, 1192, 1210, 1278, 1582, 2193, 2372, and 2713. Part 1 contains an analysis of a full collation of these manuscripts in John and concludes with a family stemma that expresses the relationships between the manuscripts and how they connect to the non-extant Family 1 archetype. Part 2 contains a reconstructed Family 1 text with critical apparatus for John. The results of this thesis confirm that 1 and 1582 are leading Family 1 manuscripts in John, but demonstrate that a new subgroup exists, represented by 565, 884 and 2193, that rivals the textual witness of 1 and 1582. This subgroup descends from the Family 1 archetype through a different intermediate ancestor to that shared by 1 and 1582. The discovery of this subgroup has broadened the textual contours of Family 1, leading to many new readings, both text and marginal, that should be considered Family 1 readings. The reconstructed text is based on the witness of this wider textual group and is offered as a replacement to Kirsopp Lake’s 1902 text of John.

The study of metaphor has enjoyed a great deal of interest in recent years. Far from being considered a mere rhetorical or poetic device, metaphor has now been shown to play a fundamental role in human language and cognition. However, despite its prominence and utility in discourse, learners of English have been shown to struggle with both the production and comprehension of metaphor. The concept of ‘metaphoric competence’ should thus be considered an important aspect of language teaching and learning, but its definition and measurement remain problematic. This thesis uses an investigation of metaphor use in the written examinations of French and Japanese learners of English to address four main areas. The first investigates the development of metaphor use across different levels of written language. The second seeks to exemplify the way in which metaphor use is related to other aspects of language in this context, particularly lexis and phraseology, while the third explores the functions learners use metaphor to perform. The fourth area draws together these insights to explore what ‘metaphoric competence’ might mean in the context of learners’ exam-based written language, and how it might be measured.

The current study investigates the phraseological behaviour of two high frequency nouns, \(time\) and \(thing\), and aims to explore the role of phraseology in the construction of meaning in discourse and how phraseology is represented in English teaching in China. The term “phraseology” in this study refers to both the form of lexical or lexicogrammatical co-occurrence (e.g. collocations, lexicalised phrases, patterns and frames) and their usage (e.g. syntagmatic, semantic, pragmatic and textual features). The results show that there is a close relationship between phraseology and phenomena such as polysemy, metaphor, evaluation and vagueness which are important to the construction of meaning. These phenomena are largely exhibited by phraseological items rather than single words. The current study argues that phraseology rather than individual words should be considered as the primary unit of meaning in discourse. The results suggest that phraseology can serve a disambiguating role both at the ‘lexical’ level (e.g. different senses of a ‘polysemous’ word or phrase) and at the ‘discourse’ level. For instance, different metaphorical or evaluative meanings can be identified by examining the use of phraseological items associated with these meanings. This study also shows that the representation of phraseology in English teaching in China is still problematic in terms of the selection and presentation of phraseological items, and recommends that more attention be paid to the treatment of phraseology in teaching and that corpus evidence should be used to inform the design of future pedagogic materials in China.

Often when teaching oral communication, great emphasis is placed on the use of target English language only in the classroom. Reasons often given to defend this policy include the use of L1 in learning English causes unwanted language interference and extended “thinking-time” slowing down a conversation. However this may not be the best policy when producing L2 writing, particularly in the early planning stage where the use of L1 might in fact reduce cognitive loads on L2 writers especially if the topic of the writing is linked to a writer’s L1 and may be best recalled in L1. This PhD study explores the questions and reservations regarding the optimum methods of planning an English essay by Japanese writers of L2 English, both in the UK and in Japan, at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, with particular focus on the variables of language of planning and topic choice The overarching aims of this PhD study are * To investigate whether planning in L1 about an L1 related topic or planning in L2 about an L2 related topic (language and topic match conditions) enhances L1 Japanese writers’ final essay texts in L2 English. * To investigate whether topic choice independent of planning language, or planning language independent of topic choice (language and topic mismatch conditions) have any impact on plans or resulting L2 English final essay texts. This investigation takes place in three common contexts in which L1 Japanese writers of L2 English operate. The design of the study and methods used to collect, analyse, discuss and compare data are done both quantitatively and qualitatively, that is empirically and also hermeneutically.

This is a report of a six-year study of working and writing practices in an engineering environment. It is an investigation into a distinctive discourse community of design engineers conducted from an ethnographic perspective. It surveys the engineers’ attitudes towards writing and texts, and describes their distinctive writing practices, including collaborative writing. It shows them to have been acculturated into work attitudes, procedures, and a writing style which are at odds with actual demands made of them in the workplace. The engineering-lore about engineers being generally incompetent or indifferent writers is explored and, for the most part, debunked. The texts that design engineers write are identified, and it is shown that product design, the type of work activity that most engages and concerns the engineers, provides a common thread throughout all the documents considered. Particular attention is paid to proposals and executive summaries, since they give rise to specifications and requirements, all of which give most cause for concern to the engineers and the company. It is shown that proposals are ultimately persuasive in intent, in which engineers must convince the Customer of the superiority of their ‘solution’ over the proposal submissions from other companies. Pragmatism and problem-solving underpin the approach taken to proposal documents, the description and analysis of which is intended to be useful to the engineer writers themselves, and intended to reflect their collaborative writing practices. An analytical approach has been devised, based on information content, which is of potential use for diagnostic or evaluative purposes. Findings arising out the analysis suggest that the proposals and executive summaries written by design engineers comprise a selection of Information Components (ICs) drawn from a finite set of thirty-nine ICs. They indicate the existence of four major foci for proposal texts: three information-based, and one metadiscoursal. The results also seem to indicate that proposal writers may be focusing too much on product design in proposals to the detriment of other key information, which also contributes to the overall ‘solution’.

This thesis presents an analytical study of the expression of evaluation in a highly opinionated type of discourse. This exploration, chiefly motivated by a concern with pedagogical issues, sought to identify and describe some of the strategies used by writers to convey explicit and implicit interpersonal meanings in order to help non-native learners read more critically. In particular, the study attempted to account for some resources of indirect evaluation which have been little described so far. The analysis is on the one hand based on some aspects of the Appraisal Theory, especially on White's (2004, 2005/6) notions of naturalisation and unarguability, and on the other on evaluation conveyed through attributed material. It is argued that such resources indirectly position readers in a stance similar to the writer's own, which places him/her in control of the material and thus, ultimately, of the readers' views. The study concluded that none of the individual strategies was significantly powerful by itself, but that they all interact and reinforce each other's meanings, adding to the cumulative attitudinal effect of the text. It is suggested that the strategies identified in this particular type of text are likely to occur in other text types as well.

This study examines the representation of foreign countries in two US newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The corpus comprises foreign news reports between the years 1999-2003 amounting to approximately 42 million words of running text. The thesis presents 5 analyses each focusing on collocational and semantic patterns of a given set of keywords. In the first study, premodifiers of the keywords countries/ country/ nations/ nation are examined. It is argued that the semantic patterns of the premodifers construe a hierarchy and polarity among the countries concerned. In the second study, collocates indicating mental and verbal processes of Arab leaders and European/ European Union/ EU leaders are examined. In the third study, verbs of saying attributed to the keywords Blair and Hussein are examined. In the fourth study, the lexical collocate said and a set of grammatical collocates of the keywords China/ Japan/ North Korea/ South Korea are examined. These three analyses show that there are subtle and nuanced patterns in the representation of the countries and leaders which correspond to the countries’ relationship with the US and which transmit the ‘friend and foe’ or ‘us and them’ ideology. In the fifth study, the collocational patterns of the keyword democracy are examined. The analysis shows evaluative and rhetorical functions in the use of democracy in the context of foreign countries. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate cumulatively formed patterns of the representation of foreign countries which can be characterised by the two semantic themes of asymmetry and stereotyping.

This thesis reports a study using a corpus of text messages in English (CorTxt) to explore linguistic features which define texting as a language variety. It focuses on how the language of texting, Txt, is shaped by texters actively fulfilling interpersonal goals. The thesis starts with an overview of the literature on texting, which indicates the need for thorough linguistic investigation of Txt based on a large dataset. It then places texting within the tradition of research into the speech-writing continuum, which highlights limitations of focusing on mode at the expense of other user-variables. The thesis also argues the need for inductive investigation alongside the quantitative corpus-based frameworks that dominate the field. A number of studies are then reported which explore the unconventional nature of Txt. Firstly, drawing on the argument that respelling constitutes a meaning-making resource, spelling variants are retrieved using word-frequency lists and categorised according to form and function. Secondly, identification of everyday creativity in CorTxt challenges studies focusing solely on spelling as a creative resource, and suggests that creativity plays an important role in texting because of, rather than despite, physical constraints. Thirdly, word frequency analysis suggests that the distinct order of the most frequent words in CorTxt can be explained with reference to the frequent phrases in which they occur. Finally, application of a spoken grammar model reveals similarities and differences between spoken and texted interaction. The distinct strands of investigation highlight, on the one hand, the extent to which texting differs from speech and, on the other, the role of user agency, awareness and choice in shaping Txt. The argument is made that this can be explained through performativity and, in particular, the observation that texters perform brevity, speech-like informality and group deviance in construing identities through Txt.