The topic of my three-part thesis is pragmatic information in EFL dictionaries. The thesis started with literature review and theoretical explorations of pragmatic information for EFL dictionaries (Module 1). Based on the findings from this first Module, I approached pragmatics focusing on lexical items and their pragmatic behaviours in context, seeking to collect empirical data for describing pragmatics in EFL and lexicographical contexts (Module 2). However, it is important to raise the question of whether pragmatics and lexicography can ever be made compatible at all, since they have different goals, approaches and methods in dealing with different types of meaning. Their units of descriptions are also different; while dictionaries are in principle concerned with words and phrases, pragmatics deals with utterances and discourses. More importantly, dictionaries are basically concerned with decontextualised meanings, and are expected to set out relatively fixed meanings, perhaps prescriptively, in the form of a dictionary definition or explanation. In contrast, descriptive pragmatics treats meaning in context. In this third module, I will be working towards my conclusion that they are indeed compatible, with particular emphasis on politeness.

This thesis examines evaluation in experimental research articles in terms of the meanings made and their contribution to the organisation of the articles. After an introduction to the phenomenon of evaluation in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 surveys recent work concerning the process of scientific discovery and the writing of research articles. Chapter 3 returns to evaluation and its place in various theories of discourse, mainly those of Sinclair and of Halliday. The model of evaluation proposed in this thesis is set out in the next three chapters, dealing in turn with the Status, Value and Relevance functions of evaluation. Status is the function of evaluation which bestows entity, assessing along a certain-uncertain parameter. Value bestows quality and assesses along a good-bad parameter. Evaluation of Relevance is meta-discoursal and marks significance. Relevance Markers are identified, which progressively chunk and organise the text. Comparisons between texts analysed for Status, Value and Relevance demonstrate a movement towards the theoretical and an increase in complexity of argument as the sub-discipline under discussion progresses. Chapter 7 investigates the contribution of evaluation towards text structure and notes a number of ways in which discourse units in experimental research articles may be organised. The concluding chapter, Chapter 8, discusses some of the practical and theoretical implications of the work described in the thesis. The Appendix contains the research articles which comprise the corpus.

The purpose of this study is to investigate disciplinary variation in academic writing, focusing in particular on the use of adjective patterns followed by prepositions. The analysis proceeds through a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of these patterns in two large corpora of authentic texts. The analysis focuses not only on the specific adjectives found in the patterns themselves, but also on collocations within and around each pattern. The empirical focus of the study will be on two ‘soft-applied’ disciplines (Becher and Trowler 2001), applied linguistics and business studies, as represented by two corpora of research articles drawn from 16 leading journals in each field. Comparison of the results for each corpus shows that there are many differences in form and meaning between the two disciplines: it is argued that the features revealed by my analysis are indicative of the epistemological characteristics of these two different disciplinary discourses. These differences reveal the particular culture and norm of applied linguistics and business studies.

This thesis investigates the marketization of universities’ recruitment discourse, using critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methodology. University and financial job advertisements were compared synchronically and diachronically. Synchronic corpus linguistic analyses were executed on 3,000 online university and 3,000 financial job advertisements from the present day. In addition, 60 university and financial job advertisements from newspaper in the 1970s were analysed manually for the diachronic comparison. The results indicate that while 1970s university and financial job advertisements are strikingly different, 2010s university job advertisements are fundamentally aligned with those from businesses. 2010s university job advertisements and financial job advertisements seek to establish the credentials of the employer but this move is rare in 1970s university job advertisements. Universities in 2010s are construed as performing activities that are inherently promotional. Applicants in 2010s university job advertisements are construed as more equal and as benefiting from the job. The evaluative adjectives in university and financial job advertisements are largely similar. Business oriented discourse and ideologies have become conventionalized in the phraseology of university discourse. However, universities do not always adopt business discursive practices and should indeed be more selective about the in-take of business discourse.

This thesis reports a study using a corpus of lecture introductions to explore the generic features of the language used. The main research questions: What are the main communicative functions of this sub-genre? How are the functions realised? Are there any disciplinary differences in university lecture introductions? are explored using two complementary methods of analysis; genre analysis and corpus analysis. Analysis of eighty-nine lecture introductions from the BASE corpus1 resulted in a Lecture Introduction Framework which posits a two-level classification which first differentiates lecture content orientation (Thompson, 1994) versus listener orientation (Dubois, 1980). This yields three main functions, with additional sub-functions original to this study. The study reveals differences in the frequency of different sub-functions in the four disciplinary domains, reflecting different disciplinary cultures and knowledge. The corpus analysis generated a word frequency list for lecture introductions, giving a rich linguistic description of the lexis used. Further analysis on one of the three main functions; the Set Up Lecture Framework Function uses WordSmith Tools 5 to analyse the linguistic realisations of the three subfunctions, which are also the top three most used sub-functions in the corpus. Analysis of pronouns and keywords further supports the finding that there are disciplinary variations in lecture introductions.

Recent studies of metaphor have stressed both its importance to thinking and its pervasiveness in language. A number of researchers now claim that metaphorical transfer often connects semantic domains at the level of thought. This has implications for formal features of individual linguistic metaphors and for the lexical relations holding between them. The linguistic data used by metaphor researchers has largely been either intuitively derived or taken from small hand-sorted collections of texts. As yet, there have been few attempts to systematically examine metaphorical linguistic expressions in non-literary corpus data. In this thesis I use corpus data to examine a number of polysemous lexemes and I attempt to establish whether their metaphorical meanings, the lexical relations holding between these meanings, and aspects of their collocational and syntactic behaviour can be accounted for by a theory of metaphor as conceptual mapping. The investigation comprises a number of studies of non-innovative metaphorical expressions and their literal counterparts. I conclude that the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphorical mapping accounts for some features of linguistic metaphor but that it does not completely explain the data.

English speaking is arguably the most problematic aspect for adult learners in Taiwanese EFL environments. The gap between the curricular objectives and the results of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) indicates that younger generations outrun college students in learning to speak English. Moreover, the exchangeable use of terms such as English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reveals the conceptualization of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) which assumes that learners learn to speak the target language in a naturally occurring language environment. This is manifested in Language Learning Strategy (LLS) theories focusing on communication/compensation strategies. However, the initial pursuit of ‘universally effective’ LLS has been called into question and there is a need for the contextualization of LLS research. To begin with, this study differentiates the concept of ESL and EFL in order to unravel the hidden assumption of SLA/LLS. Next, in adopting a sociocultural-ecological perspective, strategies for learning to speak English are considered as niches rather than fixed entities presented in mainstream LLS survey research. Specifically, because this study aims at depicting five non-English majors’ qualitatively different ways of perceiving and experiencing in their local environment (i.e., their constructed reality), phenomenography is used to examine the person-environment relationships. Lastly, qualitatively different SLSEs will be discussed in hopes of facilitating a more reflective way of learning to speak in EFL environments.

With the growing importance of English in the global world, an increasing number of Taiwanese students, about 8,000-10,000, have come to study in the UK over the last decade. This study investigates Taiwanese learners' perceptions and strategies in relation to the IELTS test. A Taiwanese online forum has been established by successful learners who have gained a good result in the IELTS test and studied in the UK since 2002. In attempting to be successful in the IELTS test, most Taiwanese learners use the forum as one of their IELTS-preparation strategies by seeking successful peer assistance concerning materials and strategies for IELTS preparation on the forum. The members and posts of this virtual community are the focus of this project. Given that most of the empirical research about strategies in relation to a test and an online learning community focuses on teacher-initiated educational environments, very little attention has been paid to peer-initiated social learning contexts such as the one that is focused upon in this study. This study begins with an introduction to globalisation in the contemporary world, its influence on English education and learners in Taiwan, and my motivation for undertaking this study. In chapter Two to four, I explore the literature concerning the IELTS test, online self-help groups and strategies in relation to the test. Then in chapter Five, I describe the mixed-method approach and the four research instruments (the forum analysis, the focus group interview, the questionnaire, and the individual interviews) used in this study. After the research design, the data analysis is demonstrated with examples in chapter Six. In chapter Seven, the findings are presented by combining the data sources from four research instruments corresponding to the research questions. Further issues emerging from the findings are discussed in chapter Eight. Finally, chapter Nine concludes by recapping on the focus, findings, key issues, limitations and implications of this study.

The main purpose of this case study research was to find an appropriate way to enhance listening comprehension ability through self-access materials for a group of less-skilled university language learners in Thailand. The study was conducted in three phases: the exploratory, the material development and the main study. The participants of the exploratory study were ten good EFL listeners completing a set of three standardized listening comprehension test tasks. Stimulated recall protocol was undertaken in order to manifest strategy use in a listening comprehension process. The participants of the main study were fourteen less-skilled first-year university students who learned listening skills and strategies in a self-access learning way through self-access materials especially adapted to support their learning for a period of 12-14 weeks before taking a posttest. The findings from qualitative data analysis revealed that good EFL learners effectively orchestrated various metacognitive and cognitive strategies in three stages of pre, while and post listening in a listening comprehension process manifesting their underlying language proficiency. Contrary to the good EFL listeners, the results indicated that less-skilled learners used less listening strategies and were unable to use them as successfully as good EFL listeners did. Based on the findings from the third phase, the quantitative result of Wilcoxon signed-ranks test unveiled that there was a significant difference between the pre and posttests mean scores at the 0.001 level. The result was further supported by the recall qualitative analysis indicating that the less-skilled participants employed a greater amount of metacognitive and cognitive strategy use after the self-access learning process. In their learning diaries, the less-skilled participants further reported an increase of posttest scores, giving reasons for the improvement that listening skills, strategies and practice through self-access materials helped them become better listeners. The findings from questionnaire and learning diary in terms of attitudes towards self-access learning and materials showed that there was a positive attitude towards the self-access materials and learning in a self-instruction way. Almost all of them reported that they had more confidence to learn independently and liked self-access learning more than the past. The research findings shed a light on how to support EFL learners not only to become better listeners but also to become autonomous language learners.

This research was conducted for the purpose of assessing the practicality of introducing the Discourse Intonation theory in the Language Institute of Al-Baath University, Syria. Using a case study tradition, the various features of the theory were presented over a number of sessions, thus providing the participants of the study, being advanced teacher-learners, with a thorough treatment of these features for the purpose of examining their cognitive and affective reception of each of these features. The final purpose was to see if these participants would be able to pedagogically deal with these features and find them relevant to their own self-development, as well as to see if the Discourse Intonation theory is seen, from a teaching point of view, to have a place at the Language Centre. The results were encouraging. When the participants sat the course, they found it difficult sometimes to grasp some of the rules, and they also encountered some occasional difficulty in doing listening and speaking tasks, although this difficulty was not consistent, and often differed from one feature to the other. Although the participants managed to demonstrate at least a basic understanding of the rules stated in the course, they were less consistent in their ability to explicitly describe how the new rules would relate to the English language in general terms. However, the findings were promising because they contained evidence to the effect that the participants‘ thinking of intonation was stimulated, and their critical reception of DI meant that they had already taken the first step towards actively benefiting from the course, thus redefining the meaning of ‗benefit‘ when it comes to instruction on intonation. This optimism is further supported by the fact that three participants thought that the theory would deserve a place for an explicit treatment at Language Institute. This is implied by the various recommendations that the participants suggested for successfully approaching the teaching of Discourse Intonation. The suggested approach, characterized by anticipating learning difficulties and thinking of solutions, indicates an actively critical perspective and a wellinformed position which, with its positive evaluation of the place of this theory in pedagogy, shows advances on the many negative teacher attitudes expressed in the literature. The research, departing from these findings, offered some suggestions for both further teaching and further research on the teachability of Discourse Intonation, in the hope of having gone a step further in our understanding of the relationship of Discourse Intonation to pedagogy.