British-Asians have often been stereotyped in the media through their cultural and linguistic practices, and these have been exacerbated by ongoing anti-Islamic international media coverage. Such associations may necessarily impact on the identity of young Pakistani-Muslims living in the West, and by implication, their sociolinguistic choices. However, no systematic study to my knowledge has attempted to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation might play in indexing such associations. In addition, Scottish-Pakistanis who are the largest ethnic minority group in Scotland, have been neglected in prior research on ethnic accents of English. With the increasing acknowledgement that ethnic varieties may influence mainstream Englishes as well as contribute to regional and personal identity, Scotland is a prime site for such analysis with its strong sense of national as well as local identity. Moreover, young female identity in the Muslim context is heightened, and can advance the understanding of the role of age, gender and religion in language variation. This study is a sociophonetic analysis of the Glasgow-Asian accent, specifically examining the speech of British-born adolescent Pakistani girls, aged 16-18. It uses both linguistic ethnographic and variationist methods with auditory and acoustic phonetics to ascertain how social identity and ethnicity are reflected in specific accent features of their spoken English. From long-term fieldwork in a Glasgow high school, results show that distinct Communities of Practice (CofPs) emerge in the girls according to their social practices. The consonantal variable /t/, and six unchecked monophthongal vowels /i, e, a, O, o, 0/ were examined revealing fine-grained differences in realisation according to CofP membership. CofP effects were found: for /t/ for Tongue Shape gesture and Centre of Gravity (CoG), and for vowels in interaction effects with adjacent phonetic environment for FLEECE height (F1) and BOOT front-backness (F2). Findings reveal within-ethnic and cross-ethnic differences across the variables. The girls use a system of accent variation in subtle ways to simultaneously denote ethnicity, and personal, regional and social identity. This reflects hybridity at a fine phonetic level, similar to that of ‘Brasian’ (Harris 2006), but here embodied in the concept of ‘Glaswasian’.

Colour words abound with figurative meanings, expressing much more than visual signals. Some of these figurative properties are well known; in English, for example, black is associated with EVIL and blue with DEPRESSION. Colours themselves are also described in metaphorical terms using lexis from other domains of experience, such as when we talk of deep blue, drawing on the domain of spatial position. Both metaphor and colour are of central concern to semantic theory; moreover, colour is recognised as a highly productive metaphoric field. Despite this, comparatively few works have dealt with these topics in unison, and even those few have tended to focus on Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) rather than including non-BCTs. This thesis addresses the need for an integrated study of both BCTs and non-BCTs, and provides an overview of metaphor and metonymy within the semantic area of colour. Conducted as part of the Mapping Metaphor project, this research uses the unique data source of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT) to identify areas of meaning that share vocabulary with colour and thus point to figurative uses. The lexicographic evidence is then compared to current language use, found in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA), to test for currency and further developments or changes in meaning. First, terms for saturation, tone and brightness are discussed. This lexis often functions as hue modifiers and is found to transfer into COLOUR from areas such as LIFE, EMOTION, TRUTH and MORALITY. The evidence for cross-modal links between COLOUR with SOUND, TOUCH and DIMENSION is then presented. Each BCT is discussed in turn, along with a selection of non-BCTs, where it is revealed how frequently hue terms engage in figurative meanings. This includes the secondary BCTs, with the only exception being orange, and a number of non-BCTs. All of the evidence discussed confirms that figurative uses of colour originate through a process of metonymy, although these are often extended into metaphor.

Higher education in the UK has changed from a system catering for an elite, to one which aims to improve the potential of over 40% of young people (Clark, 2003). Whilst not rejecting the idea of education for its own sake, this thesis suggests that one of the purposes of this mass higher education is to fit students for employment. It maintains that for students studying English and Media, this purpose includes the ability to produce Standard Written English. It examines the complexities involved in producing English and Media graduates who have this competence and explores the power relationships involved in teaching and assessing writing. The theories of Bourdieu are used to give a perspective on the use of Standard Written English as an important aspect of cultural capital which distinguishes members of the educated discourse community. Using written work and interview data from fifteen English and Media undergraduates at one university, plus written tutor feedback and comments, it considers the reasons why students might not meet the criteria set. It challenges the notion that because spelling, punctuation and grammar are ‘surface features’, achieving competence in using them is easy or relatively unimportant. In firmly rejecting the ‘student deficit’ approach, this thesis maintains that there is a need to openly acknowledge different literacies, their social consequences and the complexities involved in changing writing habits. This acknowledgement then necessitates a curriculum which includes genuine opportunities and encouragement to acquire a valuable asset. It is suggested that in doing so, the UK higher education system can move a step further away from its elitist, gatekeeping function and closer to delivering meaningful qualifications and relevant expertise to those students whose employment prospects are linked to written communication.

Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland (OBOH&E — Smokestack Books, 2013 & 2015 respectively) are distinctive works in the context of modern and contemporary English language poetry. Although there are affinities between OBOH&E and several modern and contemporary works, OBOH&E’s visionary engagement with concepts of England and English identity, their epic expression and novel post-pastoral dimension combine to make them unique. The works’ address to England and the English emerges from an ecologically committed, broadly socialist position informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as ‘imagined community’ and Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion of the primacy of the ‘parochial’, coalescing into a literary-political position defined by my coinage utopian yeoman-anarchism. The epic dimension of OBOH&E is demonstrated in an exposition based on the theoretical writings of Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and M.M. Bakhtin. OBOH&E’s characteristic dialogical method — defined by the synchronic and synoptic temporal aspect of the works and their deployments of heteroglossia, polyphony and xenoglossia — leads to a characterisation of the books as novelistic ‘modern epics’. Finally, in an analysis informed by Terry Gifford’s influential taxonomy, OBOH&E is identified as a distinctive subgenre of the post-pastoral (another coinage) — the guerrillapastoral. The guerrilla-pastoral arises from the transgressive rural praxis of the author and is reflected and expressed via his personae, narrators and protagonists as they assert their rights in the land, in conflict with representatives of the power that seeks to restrict and deny them.

This study examined the beliefs about English teaching and learning of six Chinese secondary school EFL teachers, whether any changes occurred in their beliefs during the first three years in the profession, and why beginning teachers changed or did not change their beliefs. Data were collected over a period of 10 months using semi-structured interviews, concept mapping, and journal entries. The findings showed how teachers’ learning in the workplace influenced change or no change in beliefs, how their schools supported learning, how teachers elected to engage in activities and how these affected the nature of their beliefs.

The first part of this thesis will consider how a range of eighteenth-century novels represented the relationship between non-professional musical performance and femininity. Chapter one will consider music‟s status as a female accomplishment, focussing on the debate about the value of musical accomplishment as it appeared in polemical writing and novels by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Hervey and anonymous writers. It will examine how far these novelists presented music as a leisure activity that benefitted women in their daily lives and how they responded to a prevalent dichotomy of intellectual endeavour and musical accomplishment. It will trace the changing function of music throughout Jane Austen‟s fiction, placing it in the context of other novels of the time, while arguing that these women writers managed to criticise certain attitudes that motivated the pursuit of musical accomplishment without rejecting music as a creative skill. Broadly, the first chapter will investigate eighteenth-century polemical writing and novels with an eye to examining how musical accomplishment became a marker of femininity in novels. Chapter two will scrutinise the role of concerts in four eighteenth-century novels in order to consider the currency of a binary opposition between non-professional and professional spaces. It will also examine how novelists evaluated such spaces through their representations of musical performance. The second section of chapter two will explore the social and political associations given to musical instruments, examining how far the representation of musical instruments, in Frances Burney‟s Camilla and Sarah Harriet Burney‟s Geraldine Fauconberg led to a criticism of disability and foreignness. Both sections will consider how music has contributed to a debate about the rise of consumerism, the organisation of spaces, the tenuous female move into professionalism and the meaning of the term luxury. I will show that Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Ann Thicknesse responded to the premise that the professional space was an unsafe place for women by including concerts that involve both performing and non-performing heroines in various ways. Thus, they were unafraid to implicitly comment on the divides between the private and public spheres. The second half of the thesis examines responses to music in the eighteenth century by analysing the relationship between music-making, sensibility and the responsive body. The third chapter will assess how male observers and suitors responded to female musicmaking, questioning both how far this altered the way in which sensibility has been understood and the central role of the body in scenes of music making. It will traverse a wider segment of literary genres and include analysis of French and Irish, as well as English, novels to assess how far nationality affected the relationship between gender, sensibility and music. Chapter four will examine musical courtship scenes, considering how far music was used as a tool in courtship and identify it as a language specifically suited to the rules of marriage-making. It will also explore the relationship between music, femininity and courtship in novels published between 1750 and 1814.

This dissertation concentrates on the role of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY in English hymns of the 17th and 18th centuries, addressing the following research questions: 1) To what extent and in which contexts have elements of the lexical category of travel, applied metaphorically, been used in English spiritual language and literature in the period 1650–1800? 2) How has metaphorical extension affected the semantic development of this category? This dissertation discusses the use of travel metaphors as structural schemata for complete hymns, and analyzes the use of individual elements of travel-related terminology across a historical textual corpus. The analyses in this dissertation are undertaken in light of recent trends in semantics, and with the aim of contributing to the development of Cognitive Metaphor Theory as a tool for historical linguistic analysis and literary criticism.

Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald are responsible for some of the most popular yet obscure texts in the English Canon. Because Carroll and MacDonald are often credited with pioneering much of their genres — Nonsense Literature and Fantasy Literature — it seems that often they are labeled as originators, and not as active contributing members of a much larger literary tradition. Carroll and MacDonald were close friends and literary confidants, using each other’s works, as well as employing that of other writers. This is a study of the sources Carroll and MacDonald used in an attempt to better understand the underlying meanings and symbols in some of their works. For example, I study the analogous symbols they utilized, along with the words used to express them, to convey their ideas about identity and metamorphosis. I show that they rely on ancient, complex symbols, and the traditional language and meanings associated with them, to communicate deeply embedded messages to their readers. They employ the symbols of the worm, the chrysalis, and the butterfly, in several different guises, in their complex works. It is these symbols that allowed them to elucidate the concepts of the individual’s initial materialist state, followed by the midway period of dreaming/reflecting, and the subsequent spiritual awakening. The analysis of the literary sources they used helps to uncover symbols and themes of interest for Carroll and MacDonald, which in turn help to expose other of their sources, such as the Bestiaries, biblical stories, and the works of Isaac Watts, and William Blake. I attempt to explain how some of these symbols and themes function in the portrayal of coherent, yet creative, meanings in Carroll’s ‘Nonsense’ and MacDonald’s Fantasy.

This thesis investigates textual cultures of heroism in Scottish literature c. 1600-1660 as evidenced in a corpus of texts engaged with evolving concepts of martial virtue, honour and masculinity. It provides the first sustained analyses of four seventeenth-century romances – Penardo and Laissa (1615) and Prince Robert (1615), both by Patrick Gordon, Sheretine and Mariana (1622) by Patrick Hannay and Calanthrop and Lucilla (1626) by John Kennedy – and their trajectory within a Scottish tradition of writing that was engaged in a fundamental search for its ideal national hero. Over the course of this research, a series of intriguing connections and networks began to emerge which illuminated an active and diverse community of ‘martial writers’ from whom this corpus of texts were conceived. From these pockets of creativity, there emerged a small but significant body of writers who shared not just a military career but often patronage, experience of service in Europe and a literary interest in what I will define in this thesis as the search for post-Union (1603) Scottish male identity. What began as a study of romance texts was prompted to seek new lines of enquiry across a wide and varied body of texts as it sought to engage with a changeable but distinctive thematic discourse of martial heroism, conduct literature for young men disguised as romance. Its findings are by no means always finite; a partly speculative attempt is made to illuminate the path of one particularly pervasive thread of literary discourse – martial virtue – rather than to lay false claims to homogeneity. The nature of this enquiry means that the thesis examines a vast array of texts, including the fictional romances mentioned above and others such as Sir George Mackenzie’s Aretina; Or, the Serious Romance (1660) and John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), non-fictional texts such as Robert Munro’s The Expedition (1638), George Lauder’s The Scottish Soldier (1629) and James Hume’s Pantaleonis Vaticinia Satyra (1633), and their engagement with issues of martial service. It is, in essence, a study of the seventeenth-century Scottish literary hero, sought naturally at first among the epic and fantastical landscapes of fictional romance, but pursued further into the martial world inhabited by its authors, patrons, and, as will be argued, its readers. In mapping this hitherto neglected topic and its related corpus of texts, the thesis identifies a number of potentially characteristic emphases which evince the development of a specifically martial conversation in seventeenth-century Scotland. It foregrounds the re-emergence of feudal narratives of male identity in the wake of the 1603 Union of the Crowns and after the outbreak of Civil and European war, in which the martial warrior of Brucian romance emerges once again as an ideal model of heroism – the natural antithesis to the more (self-evidently) courtly romance narratives produced at the Stuart court in London. Coupled with the inheritance of a late-fifteenth and sixteenth-century poetics which foregrounds reading as an act of moral investment (from which later writers appear to select the specifically reader-focused aspects of Christian Humanism), the erudite soldier and his corresponding literary protagonist begin to emerge as the foremost Scottish hero in a selection of both fictive and non-fictive texts, from vernacular romance to memoirs and chronicles, and in prose fiction. Across this diverse corpus of texts, collective emphases upon the moral investment of reading, exemplar-based use of historical materials and Scotland’s martial past emerge as a shared advisory paradigm, a conduct book of behaviours for the young Scottish male.

This action research study, which is composed of three cycles, aims at understanding and helping Portuguese students in an EFL context to improve their writing skills in English through a blended-learning (b-learning) writing module, using Moodle. This research contributes towards a better understanding of a research practitioner’s perspectives of an action research study. A narrative inquiry approach is used to convey the action research process through the practitioner’s eyes. It also contributes to the framework of Communities of Inquiry (CoI). This thesis looks at b-learning, its affordances and challenges and the function of CoI within a b-learning environment and how the different components of a Community of Inquiry framework, namely Social, Cognitive and Teaching Presences, contribute, influence and enrich the learning and teaching experience. The methodology behind the learning and teaching of writing as well as the theoretical and practical development of the research methods are described within the afore-mentioned framework. Communities of Inquiry will be seen as emerging from the data, as this research initially was not designed to include them. However, during analysis of the first action research cycle, data began to show evidence of the Community of Inquiry and it thus became part of the research and an integral part of the remaining two cycles. A Community of Inquiry’s sustenance relies on students’ engagement and interaction with the learning platform and with the people who make up the learning community and this data provides evidence for the framework in this research, which exemplifies and justifies the community of inquiry framework. Data for this thesis has been gathered using a mixed methods approach and thus the sources are varied. Interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, a research diary, class recordings and field notes and online interaction through forums, emails and messages compose the sources of the data for this research.