Willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) has become an important focus of inquiry in applied linguistics over the last decade or so. However, little is currently understood about the practical tasks of producing communicatively competent L2 users in Chinese higher education, an aim which has been fully recognized by the English language teaching (ELT) sector in China. In order to fill this gap, this research study was conducted in one of the universities in mid-east China over a period of one academic term with the aim to produce an empirically-supported fine-grained portrait of Chinese EFL learners’ L2 WTC in actual communication actions. Informed by complexity theory and adopting a qualitative multi-case study research design, this research focused on five first-year postgraduate student participants and investigated their L2 WTC experiences in communicative actions through multiple sources of data, including individual life story interviews, ethnographic classroom observations followed by stimulated recall interviews, and photo-based interviews. The findings confirm L2 WTC as a multidimensional and complex construct, and further demonstrated that the features and trajectories of individuals’ L2 WTC are interrelated, dynamic and largely unpredictable. This study has also identified a construct that seems central to understand L2 WTC: socially constructed future self-guides. The study has shown that our understanding of students’ actual L2 engagement offers critical pointers for practical interventions for encouraging and supporting language learners’ development of a healthy sense of self with regards to L2 learning and, consequently, of their L2 WTC.

This study investigates the representations of sexuality within a unique corpus of sex education manuals for British teenagers, published between the years 1950 and 2014. It brings together a disparate set of linguistic and multimodal analyses under the aegis of Queer Linguistics, which takes as its focus the way writers and speakers orient themselves and others to social and sexual normativities. Queer Linguistics is an emerging discipline, and it is hoped that the present study will contribute to the field by demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of linguistic perspectives and approaches. The study draws upon the SexEd corpus, which comprises a unique collection of 88 sex education manuals published in Britain. It represents the only longitudinal body of texts of its type, and the only such body to be subjected to rigorous linguistic analyses.

This study investigated the ways English native and Arab EFL student writers in a UK university from two disciplines (i.e. Linguistics and Literature) use language in their master’s dissertations to interact with readers. How they present themselves and convey judgements and opinions, and how they connect with readers and establish rapport were examined by the employment of Hyland’s (2005b) model of stance and engagement, which encompasses nine categories: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, reader references, directives, asides, questions, and references to shared knowledge. The primary data used consisted of a corpus of 39 master’s dissertations and discourse-based semi-structured interviews with 15 of the writers. While a corpus analysis helped to reveal which features were overused and which ones were underused, interviews were conducted to discover more about how and why the writer participants used such features in their academic writing. The findings suggest that while it is true that both disciplinary community and cultural background are very likely to have an impact on the way writers position themselves and their readers, there are other factors related to the students’ conceptions of academic writing in general and their audience in particular which appear to have a more vital role in the writers’ use of stance and engagement markers. These include personality differences, stylistic preferences, previous education, and supervisors’ comments and advice. The thesis closes by exploring the implications of this study for both EAP writing pedagogy and dissertation supervision and proposing some new directions for future research.

Within the socio-cultural school of thought, Galperin, was influenced by Vygotsky’s theory of mind. Following Vygotsky’s argument about the leading role of instruction within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Galperin developed an instructional approach, known as Systemic Theoretical Instruction (STI), which encourages the active construction of materialized concepts and their monitored transformation into mental processes in order to foster development. Following from this, the present thesis aimed at investigating a) how knowledge at a conceptual level can be fostered and supported online, b) the affordances of an online (Moodle-based) Pedagogic Unit to potentially foster L2 English online academic training with specific reference to Applied Linguistics terminology (although the findings could be applicable to other disciplines as well) c) the effectiveness of the online scaffolding mechanisms that were developed for each online task and d) the students’ views with regards to all the previous. To this end, this study adopted an exploratory qualitative approach and collected various types of data to support conceptual development among 13 UK based L2 learners who were pursuing postgraduate studies. Importantly, while existing STI investigations have employed mainly qualitative data, the analysis conducted for this study included both quantitative and qualitative methods such as introspection techniques, recorded interviews, pre-post interview tasks, concept-mapping, online Moodle tasks and questionnaires, screen-captures and audio recordings of the online activities. The findings revealed that the Moodle unit was a suitable environment in fostering the students’ conceptual development and that specific scaffolding features and types of tasks have contributed towards this. Furthermore, this study contributes to the growing body of research into the potential role of scaffolding to enhance ZPDs in online environments in order to facilitate the L2 learners’ English for Academic Purposes training. It also sheds light into the affordances of STI and online environments to develop the students’ academic speaking and reading skills which, ultimately, contribute to overall conceptual development. Finally, it highlights the potential role of verbalisation (through introspection tasks, use of concept maps and oral presentations) as a means of both fostering and assessing conceptual development.

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.