This study argues for EFL teacher autonomy and empowerment in Saudi higher education institutions based on the assumption that participating in school decision-making would help to enhance teachers’ perceptions, expertise, and commitment towards their own practices. This research is teacher-centred in the sense that it is written from the teacher’s point of view, at a time of multiple changes in Saudi Arabia, where teachers’ views are not always taken into consideration. The research focus is on teachers’ perceptions of current EFL practices and the role they play in curriculum development and planning, and considers what barriers are hindering them from working towards student-centred and active inquiry-oriented learning environments. The data used to examine teachers’ perceptions and experiences of current English language teaching (ELT) practices are drawn from a sample of 12 female Saudi EFL teachers, who have been awarded international degrees and who are practising ELT in a university in Saudi Arabia. Data sources include semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, focus group discussions and a drawing activity. The findings revealed: (1) Overall, bureaucracy and a top down approach adopted by the higher education institution affects teachers’ perceptions and pedagogical quality; (2) Empowerment appears to be an essential, but not sufficient condition to achieve real changes and successful educational outcomes as it depends on teachers’ expertise and their own methods of instructional practice; (3) The need for more continuous professional development (CPD) programmes is an emergent aspect that requires further attention. Three significant issues were raised for further research and comment, relating to the mismatch between current policy aspirations for professional development and the reality of teachers’ experience. At the end of this thesis, implications for in-service training of teachers in a mono-cultural society such as Saudi Arabia were discussed.

This thesis recovers the wordbooks for Handel’s oratorios from their neglect in literary and musical history. Taking Joseph and his Brethren and Hercules as samples, it shows the essential place of wordbooks in the original oratorio experience and challenges an editorial and performance practice which favours music over words. Chapter One presents editions of the wordbooks of Joseph and Hercules in order to offer a transmissional history, and Chapter Two reclaims the literariness of the librettos and demonstrates their effectiveness. Chapter Three examines the two librettos in the composer’s and copyist’s manuscript musical scores prior to first publication of the wordbooks and reveals verbal changes made during composition of the music. Chapter Four explores the significance of wordbooks for the booksellers of Joseph and Hercules and reconstructs aspects of wordbook production and consumption. Chapter Five identifies the wordbooks’ printer and places wordbook production in the context of book trade regulation and copyright. Chapter Six discusses the material identity of the wordbooks and the design principles which supported their reception. The thesis concludes that access to printed librettos is essential to redress the verbal-musical imbalance in contemporary performances of Handel’s oratorios.

This thesis explores PhD-researcher oral presentations (OPs) in five studies on engagement and clarification strategies in a parallel corpus of 88 OP transcription-essay pairs (n=128228 tokens). Corpus and statistical significance procedures identify features that discriminate among researchers' levels of oral achievement and disciplines: gestural-verbal deixis, audience and impersonal identity projection, code glosses, and transformations of written into oral content. Features analyses include distribution across the levels and disciplines subcorpora, recurrent patterns, discourse functions, and pragmatic appropriacy and grammatical variety. The studies reveal that levels differ in the way that presenters mark stance authorship, anticipate the audience need for help, and vary their strategies grammatically. Disciplinary differences re-present the ways in which disciplines (re)produce knowledge. Hard-fields focus on research methods and outcomes is observed in interaction with images, academic identity projection, and technical terms explanation. Soft-field OPs focus on interpretations is observed in opinions towards existing knowledge and use of folk examples. Language choices also reflect the non-expert character of the audience. This thesis contributes to the study of oral academic genres by demonstrating the importance of multimodal, across modes, non-deficiency analyses; confirming disciplinary differences; and proposing ways of understanding levels of achievement based on pragmatic success rather than grammatical accuracy.

'Half' is a dual narrative following the stories of sisters Sadie and Hannah on a less than harmonious trip round the Western States of America, and Olive Oatman, a fourteen-year-old girl captured by Native Americans in 1851. Olive’s account of servitude and acculturation with the Mohave Indians is in fact the fictionalisation of a memoir, told through a journal Sadie acquires. While the modern narrative in 'Half' is also based extensively on biographical content, the resulting novel is most definitely fiction. The accompanying research explores the point at which memoir and fiction intersect, asking if there is ever absolute truth or absolute fiction when utilising one’s own experiences as a framework for a narrative. Using evidence from historians it examines the extent to which the key texts discussed in the Thesis, classified as Memoir or Fiction, can be seen to occupy the middle ground between both tropes. It also looks at how the novel 'Half' incorporates a complex range of personal experience and imaginative explorations through its key themes of otherness, sisterly relationships and the role of fathers – and how the two narrative strands dovetail in both obvious and unpredictable ways to express the dark subtext of the novel.

When bilinguals process words in one of their languages, the words in their other language are also activated. This activation can be due to shared conceptual representations or to direct cross- linguistic links between the words at the lexical level. The nature of the activation is affected by the bilingual profile of the speaker, with more proficient L2 speakers activating conceptual representations directly while less proficient speakers arc more dependent on lexical level links. The aim of my research is to investigate the role of bilingual profile in the lexical organization of Arabic-English bilinguals. Bilingual profile refers to relative status of the two languages, which can depend on a number of factors for example, language dominance, age of acquisition and proficiency. In this thesis I test the lexical processing of Arabic-English bilinguals in masked and visible priming of lexical decision to written words. Arabic and English have different scripts and also differ in their morphological structure making them ideal languages for testing lexical level cross-linguistic activation. I examine the effect bilingual profile on the effect of morphological and semantically related Arabic primes and targets and the effect of Arabic morphological and translation primes on the processing of English targets.

This thesis investigates the differences between live blogs and traditional online news articles, and differences in how readers evaluate them. Building on developments in reader response studies, news media studies, and studies of evaluative language, I analysed live blogs and traditional online news articles for their structure and use of evaluative language. I show how live blogs present news events as more temporally close to the reader than traditional online news articles and ascribe evaluations of the reported news events to news actors, while traditional online news articles present evaluations ofthe news events more often as objective. Additionally, I conducted twenty interviews in an experimental setting with live blog or traditional online news article readers. I used qualitative linguistic analysis to investigate evaluations of the news texts and evaluations of the news events following the Appraisal framework. This analysis showed that all readers implicitly evaluated news events following news values. It also showed that readers of live blogs were more likely than traditional online news article readers to evaluate news events as affective, ascribing these evaluations to the inclusion of social media, primarily Tweets, in the live blogs.

The study of metaphor is an interdisciplinary endeavor crossing such fields as cognitive linguistics, psychology, and creativity studies. Two important conclusions on the nature of metaphor have been drawn to date: (1) the ability to use metaphor is a normal human cognitive ability and widespread in language; (2) metaphor is not a unitary construct and varies greatly from the highly familiar and conventional to the creative. Viewing metaphor as lying along a continuum, this thesis narrows the concept of metaphoric competence to creative metaphoric competence, which looks at this ability from a creativity perspective. In this thesis, it is hypothesized that creative metaphoric competence is an underlying competency, which is related to a more general creative competence, and therefore is projected onto both the L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English). In order to test this hypothesis, data from creative metaphor production tasks were collected in both languages. In addition, a number of creativity measurements were also developed with the aim of measuring the multifaceted nature of creativity. Relationships between these variables were investigated. Findings suggest that creative metaphoric competence is an individual difference variable, which could be described as a disposition towards novelty and is related to other measurements of creativity.

This thesis consists of a critical study, ‘“A Noisy Situation”: The Feminine and Feminist New Absurd in Twenty-first Century British and American Poetry’, followed by a poetry collection, 'Send Shells'. The critical study is a guidebook to the New Absurd, and thereby informs the reading of 'Send Shells'. Chapter One introduces the New Absurd as a descendant of male-dominated Absurdism; feminine and feminist humour is explored through Sam Riviere, Heather Phillipson, Selima Hill and Luke Kennard. Chapters Two, Three and Four focus on individual poets: Jennifer L. Knox’s 'A Gingo Like Me', Emily Berry’s 'Dear Boy' and Caroline Bird’s 'The Hat-Stand' 'Union' and 'In These Days of Prohibition'. The following themes are investigated: culture, class, and elitism; reality and imagination; feminine humour and sadness. Chapter Five explores apocalypse and technology through Maxine Chernoff, Jane Yeh, and Anne Carson. Chapter Six analyses failures to communicate through Rebecca Perry, Crispin Best, Rachael Allen, and Sara Woods. In conclusion Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Mona Arshi and Anne Boyer are read to explore poets utilising the New Absurd, a prominent and influential movement in modern poetry, which does not have a specific membership, and might be seen as an aesthetic rather than a school.

It is well-established that student engagement is a prerequisite and proxy for learning and development. Yet, despite its significance, student engagement has not received proper attention as an important construct in the literature of second/foreign language research, especially in research on listening skill. The current research contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon of student engagement in out-of-class L2 listening. The research was conducted at a university in Viet Nam and targeted at second-year and third-year majors of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). To attain the aims of gaining insight into student engagement in listening beyond classroom and innovating a design for enhancing student engagement, two studies were undertaken. The first or baseline study examined the status quo of student engagement within these learners’ usual self-study setting. Meanwhile, the main study examined student engagement in the project’s social networked or YouListen listening space. The research was a mixed methods case study, mobilizing survey questionnaires, a record of the learners’ online activity and semi-structured interviews. The results from the baseline study reveal a worrying status quo of student engagement in terms of time and effort investment, listening strategy use, readiness, confidence and willingness to listen to the target language beyond classroom. Besides, the learning condition and factors relating to the learners themselves were perceived to affect their engagement the most. Furthermore, several significant correlations between certain behaviours of engagement were statistically identified. Last, sharing experiences with peers, asynchronous communication, test-oriented resources and real life-oriented resources gained the learner’s strong favour. The findings of the main study depict a diverse picture of student engagement in which variation in engagement was associated with different learners and different listening or sharing sub-spaces and within individual learners. In general, there were noticeable positive signs of engagement, such as being engaged with particular listening resources, the expression of positive emotions, and actively sharing listening comprehension and reflection, all of which seemed to suggest the potential of the project’s listening space to engage learners to listen actively to English. Nevertheless, the prevalence of inflexible listening strategies and ‘quiet’ knowledge construction were identified. It was found that there was interplay of certain contextual and learner factors that might have contributed to the ways students engaged. Suggestions that might further promote student engagement were drawn and involved improvements in both the design and the learner. Based on the obtained research findings, pedagogical implications are recommended. The findings and recommendations will be of interest to EFL teachers, researchers, and policy makers.

Vocabulary knowledge is a multifaceted construct for which complete command comprises mastering various types of knowledge. Achieving this full mastery is deemed challenging and problematic for second language learners, and yet it is key for successful and appropriate language use (Webb & Nation, 2017). By understanding how these various kinds of knowledge behave and relate, practitioners can better systematise when and how they are introduced to the students, and thus facilitate the overall vocabulary learning process. Nevertheless, little is known about how these multiple types of word knowledge are acquired by learners of a second/foreign language. This thesis attempts to contribute to bridging this gap by empirically exploring the knowledge, acquisition and conceptualisation of overall vocabulary knowledge in second languages. Five studies are devoted to this aim. Study 1 examined the knowledge and order of acquisition of four different components of vocabulary knowledge (form–meaning link, collocations, derivatives and multiple meanings) in recall and recognition. It shows that those components vary considerably in their difficulty for second language (L2) learners, and implicational scaling analysis revealed that a consistent order of acquisition of these components can be established. Study 2 investigated how various factors typically identified as influencing vocabulary learning affect the mastery of those four word knowledge components. The results suggest that cognateness status of the target words has the strongest effect on knowledge of most vocabulary aspects by Spanish learners of L2 English, followed by frequency and proficiency. Importantly, this cognate influence raised the question of whether the order of acquisition of word knowledge components retrieved in Study 1 was unique to L2 English learners of cognate languages. Study 3 explored the theoretical conceptualisation of vocabulary knowledge by attempting to provide empirical support for its multidimensionality. Structural equation modelling analyses exposed that the various types of vocabulary knowledge were so interconnected that they could not be considered separate dimensions. This finding suggests that the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge are better seen as various word knowledge difficulty levels that comprise a unidimensional construct. Finally, Studies 4 and 5 tried to provide generalisability to the previous findings by replicating Studies 1 and 3, respectively, with Chinese L2 learners of English. Study 4 investigated the hypothesis that the order of acquisition outlined in Study 1 for Spanish learners depended partially on the cognate status of the participants’ language. The implicational scaling analysis with the non-cognate Chinese population, however, corroborated the order of acquisition of vocabulary aspects previously suggested, indicating that a universal vocabulary acquisition order might exist. Study 5 also confirmed the finding that vocabulary knowledge is not empirically multidimensional. In addition, it provided evidence for the fact that the vocabulary knowledge construct functions similarly across the Chinese and Spanish learners of English as a unidimensional concept. Taken together, the results presented in this thesis support the notion that mastering the various components involved in word knowledge is a slow and incremental process, and demonstrate that some of them seem to be consistently acquired before others. Nonetheless, the findings also suggest that these different types of word knowledge cannot be considered separate dimensions in the learners’ mental lexicon, and thereby the multidimensional structure of vocabulary knowledge might need to be reconsidered. Overall, while more research is needed, these findings offer useful insights for the learning and teaching of vocabulary in a more systematic and efficient manner.