This thesis is an exploratory study that examines the potentiality of teaching phonological awareness, which is a precursor to early reading development in English, in conjunction with letter and simple word reading instruction in Japanese elementary school English education. It is an attempt to answer a question of how letters could be introduced into it without placing too much burden on children. Comprehensive literature review argues that learning to read English requires multiple levels of phonological awareness which Japanese children seem unlikely to develop fully in their L1 acquisition, and that a more enhanced outcome of instruction would be achieved if phonological awareness is taught together with letters and applied for early reading. Two main tools are adopted in this study. The questionnaire survey for 398 elementary school teachers elucidates not only the current elementary school practices but also their beliefs and principles in terms of letter and early reading instruction, both of which are essential for understanding the field but very few studies have investigated: Many teachers present children with letters in English classes but the focused instruction of letters or early reading tends to be avoided considering possible demand for children or due to the teachers’ lack of knowledge and skills for teaching them. Furthermore, from the discussion of the both qualitative observation and qualitative assessment data obtained through the intervention in a Japanese elementary school, the following is revealed: (1) The children show L1-specific characteristics in phonological processing of English such as adding a vowel after a consonant or segmenting after a consonant-vowel combination. (2) The difficulty of phonological awareness tasks for them was slightly different from that for English-speaking counterparts. (3) The children could develop the higher-level phonological awareness skills such as phoneme deletion and substitution through the instruction and have favourable attitude toward it. Thus, this study demonstrated the teachability of phonological awareness and its learnability for Japanese children as well as its importance in English reading acquisition. Finally, some implications not only for classroom practices but also for teacher training are drawn suggesting the necessity of future introduction of it with letters and early reading into Japanese elementary school English classrooms.

This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.

This mixed-methods research aims to explore two aspects of student motivation in the Taiwanese senior-high-school context. Firstly, it investigates students’ motivational orientations for studying English after the education reform policies were launched in 2002. Secondly, it examines the fluctuating nature of student motivation and the perceived motivational factors which might cause changes in motivation. As well as this, the present study attempts to compare and contrast student motivation in different school grades (year one versus year three). This study employed a three-phase sequential exploratory mixed-methods design, with a combination of prioritized qualitative and supplementary quantitative research approaches to studying L2 motivation. The semi-structured interview guide and the item pool of the questionnaire were developed through four preliminary interviews in Phase One. Qualitative data were gathered through the interview study in Phase Two by conducting 33 individual interviews with 26 students and seven English teachers in one local senior high school in southern Taiwan. The preliminary analysis of the interview data was then used to modify and finalize the questionnaire distributed in the survey in Phase Three. A total of 428 senior-high-school students in grade one/three responded to the questionnaire which was designed to describe motivational features and motivational changes of a bigger student sample under investigation. The research results reveal that the majority of students study English because of instrumental orientation. There is no major difference between first- and third-grade students in light of seven classifications of L2 motivation. Gardner’s modified concept of integrativeness can be applicable to Taiwanese senior-high-school students today. Also, the recently-proposed L2 Motivational Self System by Dörnyei can explain student motivation through a self perspective to a great extent. Based on the questionnaire reports, the ideal L2 self shows the least significant difference between male and female students involved in the study. In addition, the ought-to L2 self found in this study presents some local features which are different from its original theoretical concept. As for changes in motivation, the research findings indicate a variety of motivational factors with diverse influences on the students’motivation when they learn English in senior high school, such as teachers, parents, peers, exams, test scores, social encounters with foreigners, learning experience, and the development of future goals. Another major finding shows that exams exert a rather complex influence on student motivation in the Taiwanese senior-high-school context.

The value of using literature in the language classroom has attracted a renewed interest and attention in the ELT community in the last few decades. Major justifications for using literature with language learners include valuable authentic and motivating material, language and cultural enrichment, as well as personal growth and involvement. However, in Taiwanese higher education, literature is often kept off the majority of university English courses and reserved only for advanced literary courses for English majors. Non-English majors are seldom provided with opportunities to learn the target language through literary texts because literature is often considered too difficult or impractical for them. To help these EFL students tap the power and potential of literature in English language learning, this study brings together literature and cooperative pedagogy to design a literature-focused cooperative learning (LFCL) project, in which students work in cooperative groups, inside or outside the classroom, to complete a variety of cooperative language learning tasks appropriate to each stage of the reading of a literary work of fiction. This project was applied to my ten-month, two-semester actual teaching of three groups of non-English majors to explore the effects of such integration holistically in terms of student experiences and perceptions, motivation, learning processes and outcomes.

Tronco Comun Universitario Inglés (TCUI) of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) in central Mexico is the context where this research originally developed. TCUI is the academic body responsible for the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to all undergraduate students of the BUAP. BUAP consists of seven Unidades Regionales (Regional Branches) which are spread across the state of Puebla, making it one of the largest and most highly populated universities in the country. Administratively, BUAP consists of seven Divisiones de Estudios Superiores (DES) ― groups of departments sharing common academic roots. Each DES of the BUAP is made of Faculties, Schools and Institutes, each with their own interests and objectives. TCUI exists in every single Faculty, School or Institute of the BUAP, making English a common subject for every student.

No description available.

This study provides an extensive cognitive stylistic analysis of one of the most intricate and vast high fantasy worlds created in modern literature – J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The two most popular works that describe this single world are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The analysis of these texts is conducted using modern cognitive stylistic and linguistic theories (Text World Theory, Schema Theory, Possible Worlds Theory and Cognitive Metaphor Theory), as well as tools from narratology (point of view and focalisation) and discourse stylistics (phraseology and reference studies). The study explores how Tolkien’s skilful stylistic usage of language enables the readers to construct a vast and detailed alternative world in their minds, making use of the combination of general knowledge and the information provided by the texts. In order to investigate and describe from a cognitive perspective some possible ways in which readers construct the fantasy world of Middle-earth, the following specific questions are addressed: 1) How does cognitive research explain how readers go beyond the words on the page to set up rich mental representations of alternative worlds? 2) How do narrative and linguistic features such as focalisation, metaphor, phraseology and reference contribute to the representation of locations, situations and characters? 3) What particular functions are performed by these linguistic features in terms of fantasy world-building? After the introduction (chapter one), the six subsequent chapters are divided into three parts analysing the texts from three different perspectives. Part I (containing chapter two) deals with the narratological aspect, analysing narrative (non-dialogue) text in terms of character focalisations, narratorial omniscience and the narrator’s identity. In part II (containing chapters three and four) world theories are used to analyse the texts. In chapter three, Text World Theory and Schema Theory are applied to The Hobbit, examining the construction of the initial text-world in the first chapter of the story, the ways the world’s inhabitants are introduced into the world, as well as the construction of the intermediate world linking the fantasy world with the empirical one. In chapter four, Possible Worlds Theory is applied to both texts, analysing the world of Middle-earth in terms of its truth-value, its distance from the empirical world as perceived by the reader and its saturation with lifelike details. Part III (chapters five, six and seven) deals with specific stylistic devices that serve as world-building tools in both texts. Chapter five draws on Cognitive Metaphor Theory to analyse personified nature, which accounts for the philosophical aspect of the world of Middle-earth. Chapter six is devoted to the analysis of stylistic modifications of idiomatic expressions (phraseological units), which are influenced by the high fantasy genre of the texts. In chapter seven, the stylistic device of underspecification (the use of indefinite referential expressions) is analysed, exposing its paradoxical expanding effect on the fantasy world. In the concluding chapter (chapter eight), the findings of the analyses are consolidated into a set of world-building functions that are performed by the linguistic features analysed.

The main purpose of this study was to probe empirically the effects of three different approaches: strategy training, metacognitive instruction and pure exposure, on listening performance, attitudes, self-efficacy and on strategy knowledge, use and perceived value among student teachers of English in Egypt. Moreover, the interaction between these three treatments and students’ proficiency levels (high/low) was an item of interest. The results of the study consistently demonstrated that strategy training is better in promoting all the variables addressed in this study and compares favourably with metacognitive instruction and pure exposure. More importantly, these results showed that the strategy training approach holds great potential for developing students’ independence and that it moved them that much close towards autonomy. These positive results stand in a stark contrast to the inconclusive results of the earlier studies. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the metacognitive instruction group performed significantly better than the control group only in listening and attitudes. Finally, contrary to the widely held belief that prolonged exposure to aural input enhances listening, the results of the quantitative analysis indicated that students in the control group did not make improvement in any of the dependent variables. Perhaps more importantly, the qualitative analysis indicated that pure exposure to the aural input alone without instruction had a demoralising effect when students found that their understanding did not increase with practice. The findings suggest some potential benefits in the informed teaching of listening strategies as a means of helping learners improve their listening comprehension skills and promoting a sense of learner autonomy. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the time devoted to strategy training is well invested and consequently refute the argument that the risk of devoting time to strategy training is not worth taking. Implications of these findings for pedagogy, research and research methodology conclude the study.

This research which is about the Issues Involved in Designing ESP Courses for Kuwait Business Institute Students with Special Reference to Computer Science Students consists of seven chapters. The first chapter introduces Kuwait Business Institute. The second offers the historical background of ESP and a survey of its theoretical bases. The third gives an account of the three stages of KBI's life span along with a critical appreciation of the English language teaching materials used. The fourth presents questionnaires and constructed interviews used in identifying needs of employers, teachers and graduates and expounds their results. The fifth presents approaches to text analysis and a functional analysis of two chapters selected from two textbooks used by KBI computer science students. The sixth goes into the classroom with computer science teachers and students and presents an analysis of three lectures by three computer science teachers. The last chapter presents conclusions from a synthesis of findings. The findings call for the rejection and replacement of current English Language teaching materials. They also support a broader needs analysis. This should include views, concerning demands made by the language of the computer science academic courses content, of teachers, students and employers. It should also include the results of text analysis component of the relevant academic courses content. Recommendations and suggestions for further research when designing ESP courses for KBI computer science students in particular and students of different specialisations in general are made.

This study investigates the intensity of English vocabulary input available to non-English major university students in the Chinese classroom. It sets out to explore the lexical environment in China by addressing five core questions: 1. What are word lists in China like? 2. What is the relationship between the syllabus wordlist and the vocabulary presented in the textbooks? 3. What is the relationship between the words prescribed in the syllabus and the vocabulary presented in the classroom? 4. What is vocabulary instruction in China like? 5. Do the classrooms for English major university students provide a suitably rich lexical environment? In order to identify the number and types of words available for teaching and learning, my analysis involved an in-depth examination of the syllabus word lists and textbook word lists, cross-referenced to other ESL word lists. It was found that the vocabulary requirements in the syllabus and textbooks posed enormous demands on teachers in terms of the quantity of words to be covered. University students when they graduate should know 95% of the GSL and 83% of the AWL, but this only covers about half the total amount of English vocabulary input from the syllabus and the textbooks. They are exposed to many of the "other" words in print. In the classroom, teachers were found to teach a new word explicitly every 2.6 minutes, using vocabulary treatment methods in accordance with the culture of teaching and learning in Chinese contexts. It was found, however, that the teachers' oral input failed to provide a lexically rich environment for incidental vocabulary acquisition and that the words available from teacher talk were limited in both variation and frequency range.