As momentous changes continue to sweep across higher education, tertiary-level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has experienced a time of challenging and sometimes painful professional transition. In many Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) around the world, EAP units have been transferred from academic departments to administrative offices responsible for international student recruitment and entrepreneurial talent development. The new locus of conflict for many teachers of EAP has centered on the significant disconnect between them and their new administrative managers about the purposes of second language pedagogy. This thesis is a qualitative grounded theory study situated within these restive dynamics. Drawing from in-depth interviews of over ninety informants at eleven higher educational institutions in the UK, Japan and the United States, I focus upon the new middle managers of EAP units, referred to in this thesis as Blended EAP Professionals (BLEAPs). I develop a Critical Grounded Theory about the processes and strategies BLEAPs use to survive in corporatized HEIs while working with international students and Teachers of EAP (TEAPs). It was discovered during the course of analysis that, even while BLEAPs are often responsible for teaching EAP classes, those who succeed in corporatized HEIs dedicated most of their energies to processes identified as Hunting & Gathering, Weighing & Measuring, and Molding & Shaping. All of these are linked to a basic social process, which is theorized to be that of Struggling to Manage and to Lead. This thesis discusses each of these processes in detail, and after explaining how the data used in this grounded theory study was philosophically construed, methodologically structured and theoretically analyzed, I consider the implications of this theory for Tertiary EAP as the profession approaches the middle of the 21st century.

This is a report of a six-year study of working and writing practices in an engineering environment. It is an investigation into a distinctive discourse community of design engineers conducted from an ethnographic perspective. It surveys the engineers’ attitudes towards writing and texts, and describes their distinctive writing practices, including collaborative writing. It shows them to have been acculturated into work attitudes, procedures, and a writing style which are at odds with actual demands made of them in the workplace. The engineering-lore about engineers being generally incompetent or indifferent writers is explored and, for the most part, debunked. The texts that design engineers write are identified, and it is shown that product design, the type of work activity that most engages and concerns the engineers, provides a common thread throughout all the documents considered. Particular attention is paid to proposals and executive summaries, since they give rise to specifications and requirements, all of which give most cause for concern to the engineers and the company. It is shown that proposals are ultimately persuasive in intent, in which engineers must convince the Customer of the superiority of their ‘solution’ over the proposal submissions from other companies. Pragmatism and problem-solving underpin the approach taken to proposal documents, the description and analysis of which is intended to be useful to the engineer writers themselves, and intended to reflect their collaborative writing practices. An analytical approach has been devised, based on information content, which is of potential use for diagnostic or evaluative purposes. Findings arising out the analysis suggest that the proposals and executive summaries written by design engineers comprise a selection of Information Components (ICs) drawn from a finite set of thirty-nine ICs. They indicate the existence of four major foci for proposal texts: three information-based, and one metadiscoursal. The results also seem to indicate that proposal writers may be focusing too much on product design in proposals to the detriment of other key information, which also contributes to the overall ‘solution’.

This thesis presents an analytical study of the expression of evaluation in a highly opinionated type of discourse. This exploration, chiefly motivated by a concern with pedagogical issues, sought to identify and describe some of the strategies used by writers to convey explicit and implicit interpersonal meanings in order to help non-native learners read more critically. In particular, the study attempted to account for some resources of indirect evaluation which have been little described so far. The analysis is on the one hand based on some aspects of the Appraisal Theory, especially on White's (2004, 2005/6) notions of naturalisation and unarguability, and on the other on evaluation conveyed through attributed material. It is argued that such resources indirectly position readers in a stance similar to the writer's own, which places him/her in control of the material and thus, ultimately, of the readers' views. The study concluded that none of the individual strategies was significantly powerful by itself, but that they all interact and reinforce each other's meanings, adding to the cumulative attitudinal effect of the text. It is suggested that the strategies identified in this particular type of text are likely to occur in other text types as well.

This study examines the representation of foreign countries in two US newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The corpus comprises foreign news reports between the years 1999-2003 amounting to approximately 42 million words of running text. The thesis presents 5 analyses each focusing on collocational and semantic patterns of a given set of keywords. In the first study, premodifiers of the keywords countries/ country/ nations/ nation are examined. It is argued that the semantic patterns of the premodifers construe a hierarchy and polarity among the countries concerned. In the second study, collocates indicating mental and verbal processes of Arab leaders and European/ European Union/ EU leaders are examined. In the third study, verbs of saying attributed to the keywords Blair and Hussein are examined. In the fourth study, the lexical collocate said and a set of grammatical collocates of the keywords China/ Japan/ North Korea/ South Korea are examined. These three analyses show that there are subtle and nuanced patterns in the representation of the countries and leaders which correspond to the countries’ relationship with the US and which transmit the ‘friend and foe’ or ‘us and them’ ideology. In the fifth study, the collocational patterns of the keyword democracy are examined. The analysis shows evaluative and rhetorical functions in the use of democracy in the context of foreign countries. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate cumulatively formed patterns of the representation of foreign countries which can be characterised by the two semantic themes of asymmetry and stereotyping.

This study explored the nature of classroom interactions in which teachers and learners from a Mexican university engaged to practise speaking. Throughout a five-year programme, learners in this context are trained to become EFL teachers or translators, and are also expected to learn the language skills to an advanced proficiency level. In a previous study conducted in the same context (Garcia Ponce, 2011), learners were found to obtain passing grades in speaking tests, but were perceived to develop a low oral competence which deters them from communicating. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study draws attention to the role of teacher and learner ideologies in language learning outcomes, showing how the teachers' and learners' diverse and sometimes conflicting beliefs shaped the nature of classroom interactions and speaking practice. In particular, the teachers' and learners' interactional- and teaching and learning-related choices and beliefs were found to influence three aspects of learner talk: oral performance, discourse functions, and negotiations of meaning. This study concludes that the teachers and learners need support from inside and outside their classrooms to break away from existing pedagogical beliefs and interactional behaviour to try new approaches which might be more beneficial for developing learners' speaking skills.

This thesis critically examines two distinct differences among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Saudi Arabia: their learning styles (specifically, perceptual learning styles, peer collaboration and tolerance of ambiguity (TA)) and the affective factors (namely, anxiety, motivation and self-efficacy) that influence their learning. This mixed-methods study builds systematically and methodically on the little that is known about these variables among Arab learners of EFL. Its originality lies in it being the first study to explore the interrelationships between six major learning styles and affective factors in an EFL learning context. To achieve this, three self-developed questionnaires were distributed to 334 freshman students at a public university in Saudi Arabia. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 20 learners. Findings revealed that the participants were multimodal, exhibited a moderate preference for peer collaboration and were moderately tolerant of ambiguity. They also showed moderate levels of anxiety, motivation and self-efficacy. Importantly, all six variables were significantly related to English proficiency and/or performance. Furthermore, all correlations between learning styles and affective factors were significant, except those between peer collaboration and self-efficacy and between TA and motivation. The thesis concludes with a discussion of theoretical, practical and research implications of the findings.

This thesis reports a study using a corpus of text messages in English (CorTxt) to explore linguistic features which define texting as a language variety. It focuses on how the language of texting, Txt, is shaped by texters actively fulfilling interpersonal goals. The thesis starts with an overview of the literature on texting, which indicates the need for thorough linguistic investigation of Txt based on a large dataset. It then places texting within the tradition of research into the speech-writing continuum, which highlights limitations of focusing on mode at the expense of other user-variables. The thesis also argues the need for inductive investigation alongside the quantitative corpus-based frameworks that dominate the field. A number of studies are then reported which explore the unconventional nature of Txt. Firstly, drawing on the argument that respelling constitutes a meaning-making resource, spelling variants are retrieved using word-frequency lists and categorised according to form and function. Secondly, identification of everyday creativity in CorTxt challenges studies focusing solely on spelling as a creative resource, and suggests that creativity plays an important role in texting because of, rather than despite, physical constraints. Thirdly, word frequency analysis suggests that the distinct order of the most frequent words in CorTxt can be explained with reference to the frequent phrases in which they occur. Finally, application of a spoken grammar model reveals similarities and differences between spoken and texted interaction. The distinct strands of investigation highlight, on the one hand, the extent to which texting differs from speech and, on the other, the role of user agency, awareness and choice in shaping Txt. The argument is made that this can be explained through performativity and, in particular, the observation that texters perform brevity, speech-like informality and group deviance in construing identities through Txt.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of a Data Driven Learning (DDL) approach on Iranian EFL learners' writing skills development and their attitudes towards the approach. A pre-test post-test control group design supplemented by a set of interviews and a questionnaire was employed to collect the required data. The control group received instructions through a conventional method while the experimental group received a certain number of classroom concordance-based handouts in addition to the conventional method. It was found that the DDL group participants can improve their declarative knowledge more than the Non-DDL group. Regarding analytic scoring, the results show that the DDL participants have improved their ‘language use’ features more than the Non-DDL group. This finding has been supported by the results obtained from analysing the ‘Accuracy’ measures. In the CAF analysis, lack of improvement in 'Complexity' features of the learners' performance and slight regression in mean length of T units and mean length of clause was explained as an indication of a trade-off between accuracy and fluency. Results obtained from qualitative data showed the participants’ positive attitudes towards the DDL approach. It was also found that DDL-based materials can help teachers in getting learners involved with learning through 'noticing'.

This thesis reports a study of a corpus of 286 suicide notes collected from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, with additional findings from 33 real and 33 fabricated notes from Los Angeles. Following some background regarding how suicide notes are treated by Coroners’ Courts and other courts in the U.K, the thesis compares topics used in real and fabricated suicide notes. Although there is considerable overlap between the two categories, they can be partially distinguished by some features that are more likely to occur in one category than the other. For example, dates, indications of author identity and trivia are more likely to occur in real notes than fabricated ones. The thesis then concentrates on fake notes and scrutinises instances of atypical language or phraseology and contextually inappropriate content. It is found that these oddities are far more frequent in the fake notes than in the genuine ones. Finally the thesis focuses on the corpus of genuine notes from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, using an automatic semantic tagger. The findings are that suicide notes contain significant proportions of items indicating affection, the future and their authors’ kin. In addition, the notes include significant proportions of pronouns, names, negatives, intensifiers, maximum quantity terms, and discourse markers.

This thesis explores the phraseologies of the two first person pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘We’, and their verb collocates in Chinese novice writers’ academic discourse. Quantitatively, the study compares the use and the function of the FPPs in Chinese EFL learners’ academic texts across two disciplines, Business and Management and English Literature, and at two academic levels, undergraduate and postgraduate. It is found that the phrases serving these functions are highly formulaic. There is correspondence between the identified frequent phraseologies and the proposed textual functions in the novice writers’ academic texts. Specifically, a textual function is often realised by one or two phrasal frames including the two FPPs. When the two disciplines are compared, more similarities than differences in relation to the phrases and the textual functions of ‘I’ and ‘We’ are observed. When the undergraduates and the postgraduates are compared, the postgraduates use more impersonal expressions and more retrospective textual organisation expressions to organise and develop their academic texts. The qualitative case study illustrates the importance of quality of using ‘I’ and ‘We’ to interact with readership and claim authority. This study concludes by discussing the insights offered into the teaching and learning of academic writing in EFL contexts.