Many Koreans not only feel strongly motivated to study English but they also enthusiastically pursue learning the language, and yet when real contact situations arise in which English could be used, many Koreans remain unwilling to do so. Better understanding this phenomenon could benefit not only Koreans but also other groups of people who see great value in learning a language but undercut their own efforts by avoiding opportunities to use it. Through a series of interviews leading to a large quantitative study, this research investigates some underlying factors which influence Korean learners' decision over whether to use English in a particular situation. The main findings suggest that the quality and quantity of previous contact with the non-Korean world, for example through travel and friendship, along with the presence and relative status of other Koreans at the communication event, significantly influence language use. These results generally support the theories of the Contact Hypothesis (CH) and Willingness to Communicate (WTC). These disparate theories, together in the Korean context, suggest a need for greater focus on L2 friendship and L 1 status issues in language learning.

This case study has been built on a theoretical basis that recognises the current status of English as an international language, especially its influence on specific domains. The theories underpinning the study generally recognise that the presumed 'superiority' of native speakers can be depreciated, taking into account the huge numbers of non-native speakers worldwide. Specifically, the study has targeted the medical field in Saudi Arabia from a needs analysis perspective, as this domain represents a typical representative milieu where the adopted theories of the language universality and its role as lingua franca can be validated. Interviews and questionnaires were used in a mixed-method approach, to investigate needs, attitudes, and motivations of both medical students and practitioners in their current or prospective situations. Before conducting the research, it was assumed that the researched constructs in presumably two different sites, i.e. academic and professional, would engender different sets of data. Yet, the participants addressed viewpoints appeared to be mostly unanimous. The findings also showed that the increased influx of Saudis in the medical workplaces has minimised the role of English as a communicative means, and English was relegated to specific occupational purposes in such settings. This specific English refers mainly to medical terms, which are mostly code-mixed with Arabic. The study concluded that in this multilingual setting, Arabic has somehow restricted the 'nativisation' of English in the Saudi medical spheres. One of the initial motives of the research was to allow a space for non-native Englishes in the context of the study. However, the study found that the issue of certain variety, whether native or non-native, is at a secondary position to the participants, compared to other prioritised needs. Furthermore, the findings exhibited some issues related to learners’ motivation and language courses failure, which unfolded the expediency of a content-based approach, namely English as a medium of instruction (EMI). More clearly, the participants’ learning experiences revealed the usefulness of EMI in enhancing their proficiency levels, more than language courses can do.

This thesis, ‘Broadcasting Modernity’ is an account of sound technology, namely wireless, as a feature of early twentieth century literature. If modernism is a historical-specific movement, and language a repository of time, then the advent of radio broadcasting cannot be ignored - a medium which inscribed itself into the pages of books. The present study is original, in that it establishes radio as a portal through which to regard the wider cultural mentality, cross-cutting, or ‘crashing’ the written word, and thus producing the effect of two wires instantly reacting to one another. Therefore, just as radio may be accessed through literature, certain texts between 1900-1945 may be reinterpreted acoustically. To qualify this argument, a select group of writers are discussed individually, and at length – figures who allowed radio to affect their creative output, at various levels, in a period of rapid technological change.

This qualitative research on task motivation is based on a four-month fieldwork in a university context in China, with myself performing dual roles as a teacher researcher working closely with two classes of final-year English majors (about 120 students in total). Positioning this research in an authentic classroom setting aims to explore task-intrinsic features perceived to be motivating (`motivating tasks'). and learner-intrinsic motivational processes during task engagement ('task motivation') in this particular context. Throughout the process, my research perspectives experienced an interesting movement: macro - micro - macro. I began my research with a broad interest in the motivation area, and increasingly narrowed my focus on `task motivation' which corresponds to the recently advocated `situation-specific' approach to motivation research. However, my following involvement in the teaching/data-gathering fieldwork pushed me to bring back the macro perspective into my research, as I found that the complex concept of task motivation could not be fully understood without taking the broader motivational influences into consideration. That is, apart from investigating how the immediate task situation influences learners, it is also very important to understand how the wider institutional, social, educational, and cultural factors influence learners' various motivational perspectives in the classroom, which may in turn shape their specific task-engagement motivation. Based on content analysis of qualitative data including written task feedback, personal letters, and group interviews, it was found that in this context there are three underlying dimensions of task motivation, that is, academic motivation, personal development motivation, and affective motivation. The study also explored what aspects of task design could effectively motivate students and why. In general, this research contributes to our understanding of Chinese university students' task motivation. It implies that adapted tasks can be appropriately integrated into the traditional English class in China and perhaps in other similar EFL contexts, and can certainly facilitate the teaching of the prescribed textbooks. It also implies that the researcher's personal involvement in the authentic teaching context is a very valuable point for both motivation research and task-oriented research.

This study investigated the grammar needs of Chinese EAP Foundation students and developed electronic self-access grammar materials for them. The research process consisted of three phases. In the first phase, a corpus linguistics based error analysis was conducted, in which 50 student essays were compiled and scrutinized for formal errors. A tagging system was specially devised and employed in the analysis. The EA results, together with an examination of Foundation tutors’ perceptions of error frequency and gravity led me to prioritise article errors for treatment; in the second phase, remedial materials were drafted based on the EA results and insights drawn from my investigations into four research areas (article pedagogy, SLA theory, grammar teaching approaches and CALL methodologies) and existing grammar materials; in the third phase, the materials were refined and evaluated for their effectiveness as a means of improving the Chinese Foundation students’ use of the article. Findings confirm the claim that L2 learner errors are systematic in nature and lend support to the value of Error Analysis. L1 transfer appears to be one of the main contributing factors in L2 errors. The salient errors identified in the Chinese Foundation corpus show that mismanagement of the article system is the most frequent cause of grammatical errors; Foundation tutors, however, perceive article errors to be neither frequent nor serious. An examination of existing materials reveals that the article is given low priority in ELT textbooks and treatments provided in pedagogical grammar books are inappropriate in terms of presentation, language and exercise types. The devised remedial materials employ both consciousness-raising activities and production exercises, using EAP language and authentic learner errors. Preliminary evaluation results suggest that the EA-informed customised materials have the potential to help learners to perform better in proofreading article errors in academic texts.

This research examines English language and literature essays written by First Year students of the English Department at Dhaka University (Bangladesh) using multi-method genre analysis. The first method used was text analysis. Essay topics were analysed from the two contexts to identify their topic fields and main rhetorical functions. This helped develop the two models to analyse the structure of essays: an Exposition-Discussion model and a Description-Recount model. Then, a total of 100 essays from the two contexts were analysed on the basis of Move-strategy structure to see what structural patterns the essays possessed, what tactical choices the students took to express the moves and what was presented in terms of content matter within those moves. The second method was a questionnaire that was distributed to students in the department to discover their perceptions of the writing tasks given. And the third method was interviews conducted with teachers and students of the department to find out about their perceptions of student writing. This, then, is a genre-based study which draws both on written data and on interaction with community members. The multi-method approach to genre analysis revealed that students of the English Department write three different kinds of essays, Description-Recount language essays, Exposition-Discussion language essays and Exposition-Discussion literature essays. The study further revealed that although students wrote these different kinds of essays, they were unable to make connections between their language essay writing tasks and literature ones because of the disciplinary variations. Moreover, the literature essays were found to be much more challenging to write than the language ones. In the light of this, the need for a fourth type of essay writing is identified. This research contributes to the fields of applied linguistics and education in several ways. Firstly, the models developed not only give insights into the generic structure of the essays students write in the English Department at Dhaka University, but they could also function as a starting point for other researchers working with similar texts. Secondly, the analyses of the high and low grade essays explain how some features of writing are more highly valued than others in this context. Thirdly, the study has pedagogical implications that can benefit students and teachers who would use genre based approach to teaching language and literature essay writing. Fourthly, this research demonstrates a multi-method approach to genre analysis which brings out complementary and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the same written products. Fifthly, it can help university planners and policy makers to consider the relationship between main discipline courses and support courses and minimise any gaps. Finally, it can raise awareness among the global applied linguistics community about the kind of student writing produced in contexts such as the English Department of Dhaka University.

The central focus of this study is to explore how learner-centredness is perceived and practised by Chinese primary EFL teachers in the recent national curriculum reform in China, which promotes learner-centred ideology in all school subjects beginning from 2001. Following an introduction to the research context, the study begins with a comprehensive literature review for the purpose of finding out where and how notions of learner-centredness originated and developed in the West from the past to the present, from general education to the field of English language teaching, along with doubts, criticisms, and confusions gathered around the ideology. This is followed by a review of studies on learner-centred educational reforms in developing countries. Chinese philosophical thoughts, traditional educational practices, and recent research efforts into learner-centred teaching are also reviewed to highlight the influence of specific cultural contexts for implementing such an ideology. To investigate the Chinese primary EFL teachers' views on and practices in learner-centredness, this study adopted a mixed mode of research methods using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to collect data in order not only to reveal the scale of impact of the curriculum reform on teachers' views and practices but also to provide an in-depth understanding of teachers' classroom behaviours with regard to learner-centredness. The study involved a large scale questionnaire survey of 1000 primary EFL teachers and 18 classroom observations of teachers acknowledged as being good teachers along with various forms of teacher interviews by which teachers' beliefs and behaviours regarding learner-centredness were studied. The main findings from the study are as follows: (1) Chinese primary EFL teachers overwhelmingly welcomed the new ideology for curriculum change while pedagogically they preferred a middle path - the teacher-directed learner-centred approach (TDLC). (2) Both their beliefs and reported practices reflected a mixture of learner-centred and teacher-centred teaching. (3) Classroom practices of 18 teachers representing good practices at the time of the study showed clear Chinese characteristics of teacher-directed learning centred teaching. Based on the data collected from different sources, the cultural appropriateness of learner-centred teaching in the Chinese context is discussed. A reconceptualisation of the concept for the Chinese primary EFL context is drawn from teachers' views, which contributes to a better understanding of Chinese primary EFL teachers' perceptions and practices of learner-centredness in China. The research has important implications for teacher educators in understanding and supporting teachers for curriculum change and for research into learner-centred education in different contexts as well as for research into primary EFL in other developing countries.

It is argued in this thesis that, contrary to much previous work on the subject, the history of English Studies in higher education is not best understood in terms of the emergence of a mature form of academic activity which has since continued to develop through time on the basis of the unity of its object (lq`English literature') and of its mode of study (lq`literary criticism'). Instead, this history examines the conditions which allowed the initial emergence, specification and delimitation of the new academic discipline of `English Language and Literature', and the sequence of subsequent institutional and discursive modifications and transformations which brought about substantial alterations to the field of study. Through a series of case studies of the English Association, the Newbolt Report, the Review of English Studies, and of the diverse tendencies which have characterised the discipline since the nineteen-forties, it is argued that `English Studies' must be analysed as an entity not having any single or consistent fixed centre. It is further shown that within the variable discursive and institutional articulations which have characterised English Studies as a field of activity, account must be taken of a much wider range of objects and relations than can be encompassed within `literature' and `criticism'; in fact, the discipline is shown to have been just as concerned with, for example, approved modes of communication, and Englishness. The thesis examines the specific historical conditions under which such objects and issues were brought into mutual relation through the establishment of full academic disciplinary status, the installation of an integrated career structure and professional norms, and the development of a distinctive documentary field, set of professional associations, range of pedagogic activities, and mechanism for the selection of students.

This thesis examines the dialectics at the heart of Ted Hughes’s work. There is no single dialectic that forms a master-narrative, but they are all nonetheless structured around Hughes’s idea of man as divorced from his ‘true nature’. This divorce establishes oppositional ideas such as intellect against instinct, man against nature, man against woman and language against truth. I argue that Hughes critiques these oppositional tendencies throughout his career, either by taking sides or trying to find a synthesis between ostensibly oppositional stances. One of these dialectics, intellect against instinct, poses a direct challenge to the act of literary criticism in the form of the foundational myth of Hughes’s poetic career. This is his dream of the ‘burnt fox’, where the fox leaves a bloody paw print on his undergraduate essay as a warning to the damaging effect that such ‘rational’ thinking has on the creative spirit. Part of my purpose in this thesis is to show that, on the contrary, the mode of thinking that Hughes dismisses (including what he calls the ‘tyrant’s whisper’ – Continental Theory) is not only conducive to reading his work, but parallels the kind of thinking that takes place in his poems. As such, the work of Jacques Lacan plays an important role in this thesis in regards to the structuring Hughes’s delineation of the split subject in relation to language and the other. This thesis is not a Lacanian reading of Hughes per se, but finds congruities in their work as a means of addressing Hughes’s poems. Accordingly, Followers of Lacan such as Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner and Teresa Brennan prove similarly useful in this regard, as each offers ways of thinking that are correlative to Hughes. The chapters of this thesis follow the progression of Hughes’s career. Chapter One investigates his early interest in how man’s relationship with nature can be represented in language through animal symbolism. Chapter Two examines Crow (1970/1) at length, arguing that the collection is the crux of Hughes’s work in that it contemplates almost all of the dialectics that emerge from his understanding of man as divorced from his ‘true nature’. The third chapter follows his poetry of mourning and melancholia during the early to mid 1970s, as Hughes goes from abandoning English altogether in his experiments with Orghast (1971) to creating a vision of the Goddess in the mystical sequences of Gaudete (1977) and Cave Birds (1978). This is followed in Chapter Four by a discussion of how Hughes resolves some of his dialectical thinking by returning to animal and landscape poetry in Remains of Elmet (1978), Moortown (1979) and River (1983). Chapter Five takes advantage of his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1984 and publication of his parable of Englishness, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992), to take a slight diversion and address his dialectic of nationhood. Finally, Chapter Six examines how Hughes’s final collection, Birthday Letters, relates back to his poetry of mourning and melancholia (looking at Crow in particular) and ultimately to the central concern of this thesis: Hughes’s dialectical idea of the ‘true self’.

Formulaic sequences are very frequently used in language as a preferred way to convey certain meanings. This thesis looks at distribution, processing, and incidental acquisition of formulaic sequences, by presenting four separate studies on different aspects of formulaicity. Study 1 investigated the distribution of four different categories of formulaic sequences (collocations, idiomatic phrases, lexical bundles, and phrasal verbs) and showed that those four categories vary considerably in terms of frequency. Also, register seems to affect the number of formulaic sequences used, as well as the categories of formulaic sequences preferred. Importantly, this study raised an issue of form variation of formulaic sequences (especially collocations) which seemed to be an under-researched area. Therefore, the following studies investigated the effect of form variation (focusing on non-adjacency) on collocation processing and their incidental acquisition. Studies 2 and 3 used an eye-tracking technique to investigate how native and non-native speakers of English process adjacent and non-adjacent verb-noun collocations. The results suggest that native speakers process both adjacent and non-adjacent collocations faster than matched control phrases, albeit the collocation effect seems to be larger for adjacent collocations. As for non-native speakers, there is a clear collocation effect for adjacent collocations and it is moderated by prior vocabulary knowledge. However, there seems to be almost no effect for non-adjacent collocations. This finding suggests that even advanced non-native speakers process non-adjacent collocations differently than native speakers. Finally, Study 4 tried to take the findings from the previous studies to a classroom. It investigated whether there is any difference between the chances of incidentally acquiring adjacent and non-adjacent collocations from reading. The results suggest low but durable gains for both adjacent and non-adjacent collocations, with no significant differences between these two groups of items. Overall, the results presented in the thesis support the idea that formulaic language is ubiquitous, but suggest that some of the criteria that have been widely used for identifying formulaic sequences might need to be reconsidered. It seems that collocations, at least for native speakers, retain their formulaic status even when presented non-adjacently. They seem to be successfully learned as non-adjacent dependencies as well. While this finding cannot be easily generalized to other types of formulaic sequences, it seems to suggest that a lot more research on form variation of formulaic sequences is needed in order to better understand the scope of the phenomenon.