This thesis investigates the language used in six fictional television series (1997 – 2014). The overall aim is to find out how linguistic patterns contribute to distinguishing features of characters and character groups. Throughout the thesis, I answer three overarching questions: 1.How are individual linguistic variables used for purposes of characterization? 2.How do linguistic variables interact to create linguistic character styles? 3.Are characterization patterns used in similar ways across characters within individual series, as well as across series? The thesis presents an interdisciplinary study of sociolinguistically meaningful stylization and produces a useful account of the underused fictolinguistic approach that links concepts of variationist sociolinguistics with stylistics. Through quantitative analysis and informed by previous sociolinguistic findings on the uses of five pragmatic forms (pragmatic markers, hedges, general extenders, modal adverbs, and intensifiers), I trace how language variation and change ties in with the individualization of fictional characters. Findings suggest that linguistic patterns that link to character qualities are consistent across a variety of investigated features. Further, some features (e.g. pragmatic markers) appear to be used with greater variance than others (e.g. general extenders), suggesting that there are distinctions in terms of saliency and availability of characterization cues. Further findings show linguistic variation correlating to particular character types, series production and genre, and character background (in particular nationality). Linguistic change is investigated through apparent time analyses for all features, as well as a brief real time analysis for selected contexts. Throughout the thesis, I touch upon concepts of indexicality, saliency, and authenticity. Finally, the thesis concludes that the present study of fictional television dialogue adds to our understanding of current language use and linguistic perception and that more studies of this kind might further enhance our knowledge of the intrinsic relation between language and identity.

This thesis analyses the development of an original body of creative work written in response to experiences gained during the 14-month period when I was employed by the Arts Council of England as a Writer-in-Residence at HMP Nottingham Prison (housing mainly lifers and long-term inmates). The creative work arose from a specific jail environment, described in the thesis as being formed from an uneasy combination of punitive, managerial, and rehabilitative concepts. The thesis argues that the creative work owes a direct debt to the ideas and practises that confronted me while I was attempting to build literacy skills in the prison. However, jail is stultifying for both teacher and student - and, ultimately, the thesis goes on to identify the additional, unexpected imaginative prompts that were necessary before the creative work could cohere into a collection. As well as offering analysis of the work's slow evolution, the thesis incorporates a selection of 23 creative prices that emerged. Many of these were collected, a decade after my residency, as a hybrid of prose, poetry, and wood-carvings, entitled The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), shortlisted in 2011 for the Ted Hughes Award. The creative work was fuelled by a growing desire to pay witness to the 'Prison Works' programme, which transformed the jail. This desire was influenced by my journalistic training, but the thesis describes how I began to discover poetry's potential, and analyses a transformation from reporter to poet. In tracing this transformation, the thesis considers ways in which journalism and poetry differ from, and resemble, each other. Further, it considers the beneficial 'aura' (Parini, 2009: 89) of writers who proved influential in the transformation, including Smith, Colburn, Parker, Liardet, Robison, Swift, and Lawrence. The thesis holds out a measure of hope. As well as discussing poetry's vital part in my own 'human flourishing' (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 17), it considers the role that Creative Writing may play in the rehabilitation of offenders. First-hand instances of rehabilitation, and verbal evaluations of the efficacy of my residency, are combined with inmate writing to suggest that it is possible for individuals to develop imaginative paths through the jail's 'forest'. However, fear and inertia are identified as two pressures upon the incarcerated imagination. And the thesis argues that these pressures are connected to societal attitudes and policies that are adding to, rather than diminishing, our problems with crime. Underlying the discussion are three main questions: (1) What pressures does jail exert upon the imagination, and creative expression? (2) What forces operated to create the specific prison environment I encountered? (3) Can writing help in the rehabilitation of offenders?

Guy Butler (1918-2001) has been gone some ten years. The institutions he created continue to make vital contributions in South Africa’s efforts to make sense of its own complex cultural and historical make-up. However, despite this evident success, there is little surety that the rationale informing his massive effort to foster processes of artistic and cultural endeavour has been appreciated or accurately understood. This lecture sets out to illuminate the thinking behind Butler’s important contributions to South Africa’s national life.

This is a thesis investigating the use of digital technology in creative writing, with a focus on innovative poetry. Three research areas explore this through theory, practice and reflection. These are preceded by an introduction to digital poetry, including an overview of the field. Chapter 1 describes the use of digital technology in appropriative writing, using digital methods to collect and re-organise text from social media to produce two books. Appropriative, allegorical or conceptual writing is discussed in relation to these books and more generally. This discussion includes reflections on the ethics of appropriative methodologies, with reference to writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Chapter 2 explores the possibilities of digital technology for procedurally transforming existing texts to produce new ones. Two creative projects are discussed, the first using spreadsheets to transform by mechanistic word substitution and the second using databases to transform by reduction and ‘writing through’. These are contextualised and discussed in relation to the work of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, the Oulipo and others. Chapter 3 investigates permutational and combinatory works and the use of machine methods to introduce programmatic randomness. A range of online works are described premised on aleatory selection from lists. The poetics of chance is discussed in relation to digital and non-digital combinatory works including Raymond Queneau, Alison Knowles and Nick Montfort. The human-machine dynamic is viewed as collaborative rather than competitive, with the machine envisaged as an adjunct to rather than an alternative to human practice. Processual methods are regarded as having most value when combined with non-processual and non-schematic elements. Originality is considered as a valid concept for procedural works, residing at the level of ideas and design. The procedural works discussed in the thesis are contextualised within a broader personal poetics of inclusivity, playfulness and humour.

This study explores the effectiveness of drama by using contemporary plays both as self-standing extracts and as a full-scale performance for developing learners’ oral skills in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency and their positive attitudes towards foreign language learning within a high school compulsory curriculum in an Italian context. The rationale for undertaking this investigation lies in the heartening results obtained when dramatic approaches were implemented predominantly within a university context or as an extracurricular activity in the language classroom. A class of final year high school Italian students with a lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate level of language was exposed longitudinally to a text-based approach followed by a performance-based approach conducted over a term each for a total of 20 lessons. A control group was taught through a communicative traditional approach. Quantitative data were collected through an oral pre-test, a mid-test and a post-test by using three tasks, both monologic and dialogic: oral proficiency interview, story-retelling and guided role-play. To elicit learners’ attitudes questionnaires and follow-up interviews were used, thus affording me deeper insights into learners’ preferences, reasons for enjoyment, their usefulness for developing language skills, problems and difficulties encountered. The results show that drama-based approaches improved significantly learners’ pronunciation accuracy, speed-fluency, breakdown-fluency, repairs-fluency, MLR, phonation time ratio, and syntactic complexity. There was no significant statistical result on accuracy between the two groups. When comparing the two types of approaches, findings revealed that the text-based approach led to a higher syntactic complexity, breakdown fluency and phonation time ratio whilst the performance-based approach led to a higher level of accuracy both on the global scale and pronunciation accuracy, and speed fluency. Neither of the two drama-based approaches led to a significant score on the MLAS, MLR and repairs fluency. The qualitative findings display mixed but fundamentally greatly favourable attitudes towards the employment of drama approaches.

The first element of this work is a novel entitled Anna. The commentary that comprises the second element argues that aspects of the title character of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 Children’s Novel, Pollyanna, resemble fictional and medical depictions and descriptions of Asperger’s syndrome. I carry out a character analysis of Porter’s Pollyanna using close reading, likening her depicted behaviour and implied patterns of speech and thought to traits associated with Asperger’s in fiction and in medical commentary. Given that Pollyanna is a public domain text written before the naming or first medical descriptions of Asperger’s, I discuss the implications of this, observing how, unlike many modern works featuring protagonists with Asperger’s, Pollyanna changes her surrounding community, not just in terms of how it operates and relates to her specifically, but in terms of how it operates and relates to itself. I argue for a need for such representations of contemporary fictional protagonists with Asperger’s, which I conclude to be more in keeping with the self-regard and aspirations of real people with Asperger’s. I then give an account of the writing of my own novel, Anna, in a subjective, essayistic style in the vein of several fiction authors’ non-fiction commentaries on their own works, such as Milan Kundera’s ‘Dialogue on The Art of the Novel’ – included in The Art of the Novel (2005, Faber & Faber, pp.23-46), and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, included in The Oxford Book of American Essays (Matthews (Ed.), 1914, pp.99-113). The objective of this work is threefold: firstly, to show what must still be achieved in terms of future Aspie portrayals, that they may better reflect and represent the capabilities and experiences of Aspies today; secondly, to demonstrate how fiction not associated with specific medical labels can provide inspiration for new treatments of Aspie characters, with transferrable implications for all kinds of fictional representation; and thirdly to show how I put these findings into practice by transforming Pollyanna to create a complex representation of Asperger’s which reflects these objectives.

This study examines the prosodic style of workers in a Scottish outbound call centre during telesales call openings. I describe the conversational structure and accompanying intonational patterns of a corpus of scripted call centre telephone openings, and investigate if this provides evidence to suggest the emergence of patterns of prosodic style or 'tone of voice' used by workers in the call centre during telephone sales encounters. I investigate how and why workers come to adopt ways of speaking via data collected during long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the call centre, paying particular attention to the training and prescriptive processes to which new employees are exposed. Examination of the classroom training period and other methods put in place by the call centre, such as scripting and managerial surveillance, reveals that prosodic style is not overtly prescribed in the same way as other aspects of the agents' linguistic performance. It emerges that the on-the-job period of training known as 'nesting' is where most managerial prescription of style takes place, at a point when workers are making the transition from apprentice to expert via increasing participation in local practices. It is during this transitional phase of apprenticeship that individual speakers begin construction of a new, activity-based persona, of which their prosodic style is a defining part.

Despite continued interest and research into teacher professional development (TPD), as an important topic within English language teaching, the researcher identified some areas where there is much still to reveal. These include: teachers' customary engagement with different TPD activities aside from when a researcher imposes some TPD activity on them for a study (normal TPD practices); whether teachers are aware of the notion of TPD, and, if so, what they think it is; what TPD activities they would ideally like to follow: and what they and other stakeholders in a particular context see as the effects of TPD on teaching (beliefs about TPD). I interviewed twenty secondary school teachers of English in provincial Syria, of varying backgrounds (e.g. years of experience, training, rural or urban teaching location) and eighteen other stakeholders with a range of relevant roles in the same context (e.g. head teachers, trainers, ministry officials). The data was analysed thematically and showed that individually the teachers exhibited beliefs that lack fully formed knowledge of the concept of TPD, though between them most of the key features were mentioned. Teachers reported engaging in a number of TPD activities not prompted from the outside (e.g. reflective) and evidenced a broad view of TPD by wanting to pursue many different types of it, not just the same types as what they already did. Obstacles to TPD included many things that would exist even without the war, such as rural location. There was evidence that teaching experience, prior TPD in the form of training courses, and contextual factors affect TPD. Teachers and other stakeholders exhibited points of both agreement and disagreement concerning the impact of TPD on teachers and teaching, though the vast majority of both stakeholders and teachers reported a positive impact, including on teacher affect as well as teacher beliefs and practices with respect to teaching. Implications are suggested both for teachers and other stakeholders.

This thesis comprises a critical essay and practice-led research in the form of a full-length novel, Void, that constitutes my original contribution to knowledge. The critical essay comprises three principal chapters, the first of which is a memoir that discusses the early comic influences that have shaped my creative imagination in the form of the films of Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Will Hay. The second chapter considers humour and science fiction, concentrating on the origins and definitions of science fiction and then focussing on Douglas Adams’ The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels and how his comedic techniques relate to Void. The third chapter considers the methods to generate humour that I employ in my own text, through the framework of the origins of comedy, the leading theories of humour, the associated incongruities of situation, character and language and my use of intertextuality to incorporate elements of Adams’ novels into my own. The final section contains Void, my debut humorous novel that blends elements of romance, science fiction and action-adventure.

Listening has long been recognised as the most challenging skill for teachers, students and researchers working in the context of L2 English. However, it has also been the least researched of the four language skills, and one that has received the least attention in second language acquisition. This study identified the listening problems, and their causes, experienced by Chinese university students at intermediate level through multiple perspectives. Included in the investigation were learners’ perceptions, their performance in phonological vocabulary tests and their recognition of words from dictation transcription in terms of lexical processing and spoken word recognition, in addition to learners’ self-reflection and the teacher’s reflection after one-semester of instruction and learning. The ultimate aims of the study were to contribute to our understanding of the nature of listening comprehension and the causes of the difficulties it poses for these learners in order to advance a research-based pedagogy to help them improve their listening comprehension skills. A mixed methods approach was employed, integrating questionnaire surveys, participants’ self-reflections, the Aural-Lex tests, and dictation transcriptions conducted both at the very beginning and at the end of the semester. Findings suggest that the main difficulties and the causes of these difficulties in listening comprehension for Chinese university students at intermediate level include the following: limited knowledge of phonology, inadequate vocabulary by sound, and poor awareness of the features of connected speech. The study suggests that Chinese university students at this level need to improve their spoken word recognition and develop an awareness of the organisation of sounds in English connected speech, as these cognitive processes play a vital role in proficient listening comprehension. Similarly, it proposes that researchers and teachers working in higher education in the L2 context should work closely together to address intermediate learners’ needs and difficulties, both theoretically and practically, in order to help them enhance their listening comprehension skills.