This study is concerned with a neglected aspect of the study of L2 English writing: the processes which teachers engage in when rating essays written by their own students for class practice, not exams, with no imposed rating/assessment scheme. It draws on writing assessment process research literature, although, apart from Huot (1993) and Wolfe et al. (1998), most work has been done on scoring writing in exam conditions using a set scoring rubric, where all raters rate the same essays. Eight research questions were answered from data gathered from six teachers, with a wide range of relevant training, but all teaching university pre-sessional or equivalent classes. Instruments used were general interviews, think aloud reports while rating their own students' essays, and follow up immediate retrospective interviews. Extensive qualitative coding was undertaken using NVivo. It was found that the teachers did not vary much in the core features that they claimed to recognise in general as typical of ‘good writing’, but varied more in what criteria they highlighted in practice when rating essays, though all used a form of analytic rating. Two thirds of the separate criteria coded were used by all the teachers but there were differences in preference for higher versus lower level criteria. Teachers also differed a great deal in the scales they used to sum up their evaluations, ranging from IELTS scores to just evaluative adjectives, and most claimed to use personal criteria, with concern for the consequential pedagogical value of their rating for the students more than achieving a test-like reliable score. A wide range of information sources was used to support and justify the rating decisions made, beyond the essay text, including background information about the writer and classmates, and teacher prior instruction. Teacher comments also evidenced concern with issues arguably not central to rating itself but rather exploring implications for the teacher and writer. Similar to Cumming et al. (2002), three broad stages of the rating process were identified: reading and exploiting information such as the writer’s name and the task prompt as well as perhaps skimming the text; reading and rereading parts of the essay, associated with interpretation and judgment; achievement of a summary judgment. In detail, however, each teacher had their own individual style of reading and of choice and use of criteria.

While research provides evidence for the educational and social value of bilingual children using and learning their home language, it also suggests approaches which support such additive bilingualism are not a common feature of English primary schools. This study sheds light on practitioner perspectives with regard to their bilingual pupils’ learning and use of their home language, the repertoires they employ when discussing their bilingual pupils’, and the extent to which practitioner talk promotes or undermines additive bilingualism. The study is based on a multi-method collection and analysis of data, consisting of a review of practitioner talk in existing literature, practitioner survey and discussion groups, and pupil survey and discussion groups to explore pupils’ perceptions of teacher perspectives. The study identifies key repertoires which represent positions both for and against additive bilingualism, and also describes how particular repertoires can support or undermine additive bilingualism depending on the starting point of the conversation. Quantitative analysis indicated differences in perspectives in relation to practitioners’ stage of career and the key stage they worked in. Structuration theory was drawn on to explain resistance to suggestions to change in practice, and make links between practitioner discourses and those in society more broadly.

This thesis considers the post-war œuvre of Louise Weiss through the analytical framework of the travel narrative. The primary sources for this study comprise the substantial number of previously unexamined journal articles, photographic collections, monographs, and short documentaries which Weiss wrote following her journeys throughout Asia, North America, Africa, and the Middle East in the twenty-five years after the Second World War. Previously defined by her early career as a journalist, her lifelong advocacy for peace, and her campaigns for women’s suffrage during the interwar period, this study positions Weiss in a new narrative – that of post-war travel writer with a desire to discover a moral code that would mitigate the turbulence and fragility she perceived in the twentieth century. The analysis of this considerable body of source material is approached through the themes of spirituality, myth, and power. These themes, which emerge organically from Weiss's multi-media post-war œuvre, offer a fresh perspective on the French post-war travel narrative and allow a new understanding of both the traveller’s gaze and the notion of displacement.

This study proposes a methodology that combines techniques from corpus linguistics with theory from the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The methodology is demonstrated using a corpus comprising transcripts of Hugo Chávez’s television programme, Aló Presidente, broadcast between January 2002 and June 2007. In this thesis, I identify a number of criticisms of CDA and suggest that corpus linguistics can be used to reduce the principle risks: over-/under-interpretation of data and ensuring that the examples used are representative. I then present a methodology designed to minimise these effects, based upon a hypothesis that semantic fields are used more frequently in periods when they are topical, and therefore one can isolate instances which were produced at times of change. I use the Aló Presidente corpus to present a detailed description of three such semantic fields and then adopt the concept of discourse strategies from the DHA to demonstrate how Chávez’s framing of the topics changes with time. This leads to a set of conclusions which seek to answer the research question: How is life in Venezuela framed as having changed under Chávez’s Presidency by reference to his Aló Presidente television programme during the period 2002-2007?

The topic of my three-part thesis is pragmatic information in EFL dictionaries. The thesis started with literature review and theoretical explorations of pragmatic information for EFL dictionaries (Module 1). Based on the findings from this first Module, I approached pragmatics focusing on lexical items and their pragmatic behaviours in context, seeking to collect empirical data for describing pragmatics in EFL and lexicographical contexts (Module 2). However, it is important to raise the question of whether pragmatics and lexicography can ever be made compatible at all, since they have different goals, approaches and methods in dealing with different types of meaning. Their units of descriptions are also different; while dictionaries are in principle concerned with words and phrases, pragmatics deals with utterances and discourses. More importantly, dictionaries are basically concerned with decontextualised meanings, and are expected to set out relatively fixed meanings, perhaps prescriptively, in the form of a dictionary definition or explanation. In contrast, descriptive pragmatics treats meaning in context. In this third module, I will be working towards my conclusion that they are indeed compatible, with particular emphasis on politeness.

This thesis examines evaluation in experimental research articles in terms of the meanings made and their contribution to the organisation of the articles. After an introduction to the phenomenon of evaluation in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 surveys recent work concerning the process of scientific discovery and the writing of research articles. Chapter 3 returns to evaluation and its place in various theories of discourse, mainly those of Sinclair and of Halliday. The model of evaluation proposed in this thesis is set out in the next three chapters, dealing in turn with the Status, Value and Relevance functions of evaluation. Status is the function of evaluation which bestows entity, assessing along a certain-uncertain parameter. Value bestows quality and assesses along a good-bad parameter. Evaluation of Relevance is meta-discoursal and marks significance. Relevance Markers are identified, which progressively chunk and organise the text. Comparisons between texts analysed for Status, Value and Relevance demonstrate a movement towards the theoretical and an increase in complexity of argument as the sub-discipline under discussion progresses. Chapter 7 investigates the contribution of evaluation towards text structure and notes a number of ways in which discourse units in experimental research articles may be organised. The concluding chapter, Chapter 8, discusses some of the practical and theoretical implications of the work described in the thesis. The Appendix contains the research articles which comprise the corpus.

This thesis investigates the social construction of an increasingly relevant aspect of social life, namely mental depression, in British and Chinese news media over the last two decades, aiming at delivering a contribution to people’s understanding of the link between discourse and the social reality of depression. A discourse is understood as the totality of all the texts that have been produced within a particular discourse community. The special discourse analysed consists of two diachronic corpora including articles in which the lexical item depression or 抑郁症 (yiyuzheng, ‘depression’) occurs in British and Chinese national newspapers from 1984 to 2009. Corpus analysis is complemented by a targeted paraphrase analysis of the paraphrastic content expressed in the context of relevant keywords. My findings suggest that in the British corpus, there has been a circular movement in the construction of the meanings of depression, swinging between a psychological problem that needs psychotherapy and a biochemical condition that needs pharmaceutical intervention. The Chinese corpus constructs ‘抑郁症’ (yiyuzheng, ‘depression’) as a problem that is normally caused by external social factors, and therefore psychological support and improvement of the social environment have been represented as more helpful than medical treatment.

This corpus-based, exploratory study attempts to fill a gap in the realm of knowledge on writer’s self-representation in academic writing. It aims to examine the writer’s discoursal self manifested by the utilisation of first person pronouns, focusing on the functional roles they occupy in multi-genre texts (paragraphs and essays) generated by non-native, undergraduate students at different levels of the College of Nursing in the cities of Al-Ahsa (CON-A) and Jeddah (CON-J) in Saudi Arabia. The students’ texts were compiled in two sub-corpora: CON-A (27160 words) and CON-J (15413 words). The data have been analysed quantitatively and qualitatively employing a data-driven framework of writer discoursal self, which includes the categories of the roles inhabited by the writer ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the text. The results mainly show the strong presence of writer as a person, who performs roles outside the text, and the rare use of writer as an academic, who occupies roles inside the text. A number of other observations have been made, which will help form a better understanding of students’ writing and their perception of identity in writing. Factors that appear to have influenced the students’ discoursal choices and acts have been proposed. Taking the findings into account, the thesis concludes with proposing some practical suggestions for raising awareness in L2 writing pedagogy, and identifying some future research.

The purpose of this study is to investigate disciplinary variation in academic writing, focusing in particular on the use of adjective patterns followed by prepositions. The analysis proceeds through a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of these patterns in two large corpora of authentic texts. The analysis focuses not only on the specific adjectives found in the patterns themselves, but also on collocations within and around each pattern. The empirical focus of the study will be on two ‘soft-applied’ disciplines (Becher and Trowler 2001), applied linguistics and business studies, as represented by two corpora of research articles drawn from 16 leading journals in each field. Comparison of the results for each corpus shows that there are many differences in form and meaning between the two disciplines: it is argued that the features revealed by my analysis are indicative of the epistemological characteristics of these two different disciplinary discourses. These differences reveal the particular culture and norm of applied linguistics and business studies.

This thesis reports a study using a corpus of lecture introductions to explore the generic features of the language used. The main research questions: What are the main communicative functions of this sub-genre? How are the functions realised? Are there any disciplinary differences in university lecture introductions? are explored using two complementary methods of analysis; genre analysis and corpus analysis. Analysis of eighty-nine lecture introductions from the BASE corpus1 resulted in a Lecture Introduction Framework which posits a two-level classification which first differentiates lecture content orientation (Thompson, 1994) versus listener orientation (Dubois, 1980). This yields three main functions, with additional sub-functions original to this study. The study reveals differences in the frequency of different sub-functions in the four disciplinary domains, reflecting different disciplinary cultures and knowledge. The corpus analysis generated a word frequency list for lecture introductions, giving a rich linguistic description of the lexis used. Further analysis on one of the three main functions; the Set Up Lecture Framework Function uses WordSmith Tools 5 to analyse the linguistic realisations of the three subfunctions, which are also the top three most used sub-functions in the corpus. Analysis of pronouns and keywords further supports the finding that there are disciplinary variations in lecture introductions.