The difference between roles prescribed by teaching methodology and roles that classroom participants are or are not willing to adopt is sometimes cited as one reason for the problems in the implementation of new teaching policy. Personal experience, consistent with such an argument, formed part of the rationale for this research into students’ and teachers’ perceptions of roles in language classrooms in Hong Kong. This thesis presents a pathway for exploring perceptions of roles of students and teachers through the development and use of a conceptual framework. This conceptual framework highlighted the need to explore the concepts of perceptions and roles, and the factors influencing roles. Exploration of these indicated that the research should include an analysis of the research context and two empirical studies. These studies focused on attitudes, beliefs and cultural dimensions and data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. The findings identified differences between the perceptions of roles expressed by students and teachers. Comparison was also made with reports from teachers and stereotypical images portrayed in the literature. While findings and differences may in part be associated with the social and economic changes in Hong Kong, they also provide insights that potentially offer greater understanding about the role relationship between students and teachers. These insights include possible implications of these findings for teaching approaches, curriculum and materials design, educational change and teacher education. The findings illustrate that students’ and teachers’ beliefs need to be investigated more deeply to ensure that further information is gained that can be applied to the teaching and learning process.

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.

Over the previous few decades there has been an increased emphasis on the cultural aspects of English language teaching. However, in settings where English is used as a global lingua franca the cultural associations of the language are complex and the role culture plays in successful communication has yet to be extensively investigated. To conduct such a study it is necessary to explicate the role and nature of English in global contexts and particularly how English functions as a lingua franca (ELF). Furthermore, a theoretical understanding of the relationships between languages and cultures in intercultural communication is needed, which emphasises the fluid and dynamic nature of any connections. The thesis focuses on cultural awareness (CA) as an approach to equipping learners and users of English for the diversity of intercultural communication. However, it is suggested that CA has still not incorporated an understanding of the multifarious uses of English in global contexts where no clear cultural associations can be established. Thus, intercultural awareness (ICA) is offered as an alternative which addresses these needs. This results in the formulation of research questions which aim to explore how ICA can best be characterised in an expanding circle setting and the role it plays in intercultural communication. Furthermore, this research also aims to explicate the relationships between the English language and cultures in such an environment and how this reflects on language use and attitudes. The study was predominantly qualitative utilising approaches associated with ethnography with the aim of producing a rich description of the research participants and their environment. The fieldwork took place over a six month period in a Thai university and seven participants formed the core of this study. The main data sources were recordings of the participants engaged in intercultural communication and interviews with the participants. These were supplemented with a survey, diaries, observations and documents from the research site. The findings of the study suggest that in successful intercultural communication culturally based forms, practices and frames of reference are employed as emergent, dynamic and liminal resources in a manner that moves between individual, local, national and global references. Furthermore, the results also indicated that ICA was a valid construct in the context investigated for explaining the types of cultural knowledge and related skills needed by participants to take part in successful intercultural communication through English.