This study explores the role of existing language knowledge and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) on pre-school children’s non-word, word and sentence repetition (NWR, WR and SR). Previous studies have revealed that children with language difficulties find these tasks difficult, but there is debate about which skills are measured. This study aimed to contribute to this understanding. Identification of the underlying skills would enable speech therapists to plan targeted therapy to support the children’s difficulties. Data was collected at two time points: at time one from fifty-four participants, aged 3-3 ½ years old; and at time two from fifty-two of the original sample (aged 4 -4½ years). The study is split into four parts. First it explores three influences on the children’s WR and NWR: knowledge of the words, speech sound skills and PSTM, at both time-points. The second part divides the group into children with and without identified speech and language difficulties. It explores differences in performance by the two groups. Part three explores the influence of grammar (morphology) and PSTM on sentence repetition. Part four investigates relationships between children’s NWR and WR at both time points with their SR at the second time-point. There was evidence at both time-points that children draw on long-term word knowledge during WR and no evidence of them using PSTM in this task. There was a clear influence of PSTM on their NWR. The children’s speech affected both NWR and WR. The clinical group repeated both known words and non-words less accurately than the non-clinical group. They showed a similar pattern of performance in their repetition of non-words, but achieved lower scores across all syllable lengths. Children aged 4 years used existing grammatical skills when repeating sentences. There was limited evidence of the influence of PSTM. A correlation was found between children’s NWR and later SR. The relationship was due to the influence of language knowledge and PSTM on both tasks. Results from the study suggest that for both NWR and SR language knowledge and PTSM interact in their effect on accuracy. The tasks are however useful clinically because children’s scores are influenced by their existing language knowledge.

This thesis is designed to explore three selected genres which are associated with a Scottish-built ship, RMS Queen Elizabeth, and her launch event in 1938. The main focus of this research is an exploration of how writers construct their texts by creating an interpersonal relationship with their readership in order to fulfil their communicative purposes. Specifically, it examines the generic structures and the lexico-grammar of the texts representing these genres from various theoretical perspectives. The present study analyses a set of business letters, newspaper articles and a promotional brochure which revolve around the launch event of the historic liner. The texts representing these genres are examined in terms of their generic structures using Swales’ move analysis model (1990; 2004) and Hasan’s generic structure potential framework (1985). In addition, a lexico-grammatical analysis of these texts focuses on the use of modal verbs as modality markers, analysed using three distinctive frameworks i.e. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, Martin and White’s (1998) Appraisal Framework, and Halliday’s (1994) modality system as markers of authorial commitment and/or obligation in propositions. The differing foci on the use of the modal verbs in the study are motivated by the aim of showing how these lexical items function in different genres. As a final analysis, these modal verbs in the respective genres are examined for their lexical properties using Sinclair’s (1996) and Stubbs’ (2002) Models of Extended Lexical Units. The analysis of the lexical properties of the modal verbs suggests that these lexical items possess certain patterns particularly in terms of colligation, semantic preference, and discourse prosody. The generic structures of the texts in the study are also found to serve the communicative purposes of the texts. It is also found that modal verbs are deployed by the writers to serve various functions in the three genres. In conclusion, all these findings indicate that despite being bound by a single event, these genres were clearly produced to address the communicative purposes as agreed upon by members of the individual communities of practice during that period.

English has been used around Thailand for wider communication between Thai and non-Thai speakers. This thesis focuses on the use of English for communication on signs in tourist domains across Thailand. The research aims to, first, analyse the main characteristics of English used in Thailand, so-called Thai English, and, second, find out to what extent Thai English is intelligible to non-Thai speakers. The study was drawn from 1,828 photos of Thai English signs. The signs were first categorised based on grammatical features and lexico-semantic features. Then, 30 signs were selected to make an online questionnaire about the intelligibility of Thai English. They were divided into three levels, namely Level 1: no errors (but socio-culturally unintelligible), Level 2: minor errors, and Level 3: major errors. The questionnaire was done by 456 international and 810 Thai participants. Then 51 in-depth interviews were conducted. The findings showed that signs with Thai English could be fairly understood when they contained no errors (Level 1) or minor errors (Level 2). However, when signs contained major errors (Level 3), neither native nor non-native speakers of English could understand the intended meanings. The key factors contributing to the intelligibility of Thai English were non/native English speaking background and English proficiency of the participants. The research found that native speakers could understand Thai English better than non-native speakers because the former could negotiate the meanings of the Thai English messages better than the latter. Non-native speakers with higher English proficiency could also understand Thai English better than those with lower English proficiency. Finally, the research found that international participants tended to pay more attention to meaning than to form. If they could grasp the meaning of the message, albeit grammatically incorrect, they would still consider the error not serious. Conversely, Thai participants appeared to be pedantic about grammar and would consider the items with grammatical errors more serious than those with lexico-semantic errors. Thai participants accepted that the research into Thai English helped to raise their awareness of using English in everyday life while international participants revealed that this research helped to make them understand the use of English as a lingua franca in Thailand better.

This research study examined College English teachers’ perceptions and enactment of a systemic curriculum reform at the classroom level in a Chinese university and the major issues involved in the complex process through an approach of case study. Drawing upon data collected through analysis of documents, semi-structured interviews and classroom observations, the study found that the enactment of China’s systemic College English Curriculum Reform was not a matter of simple implementation but the result of a more complex process which changed the original reform intention. The research, therefore, argues that multi-level challenges intertwined to shape teachers’ individualized classroom instructions. On the one hand, many factors worked together to facilitate teachers’ positive attitudes towards and adherence to the intended changes, such as the direction of national curriculum reform, harmonious workplace culture, teachers’ constructivist beliefs and self-reflection, and students’ feedback. On the other hand, levels of contextual tensions and gaps caused confusions and challenges in the teachers’ actual classroom instructions, such as the inconsistency among the policy strands, gaps between the institutional regulations and the national policy intent, classroom realities, Chinese students’ characteristics and teachers’ English proficiency. Thus, despite teachers’ general endorsement of and positive attitudes towards the proposed changes, they failed to enact them effectively and purposely at the grassroots level. All the teachers in this study experienced some changes in their teaching behaviors, but most of the changes were incremental and context-driven rather than radical and curriculum-oriented as intended. The findings suggest that the enactment of a top-down curriculum reform is mediated through an interplay of forces and challenges and that the major impetus for how teachers make sense of and enact the reform relates more to the strength of their current values and practices and students’ feedback, rather than the power of external initiatives. Without localized management, a centralized curriculum reform itself is, therefore, insufficient to ensure changes in practices. The research therefore adds our knowledge to the complexities of curriculum enactment and how external initiatives are interpreted and translated by multi-layer policy actors in the context of educational reforms, particularly, in China. The findings also have important implications for the policy makers in revisiting the way they formulate, design and implement future curriculum innovations. The results also provide information to the administrators and the front-line teachers concerning the significance of institutional perspective and teacher agency in interpreting and translating external initiatives, and the complexities involved in the organizational and individual changes.

This thesis examines key developments and changes which have taken place within the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) from the 1960s until the present day. It critically evaluates the effects that these developments have had on EAP as an academic discipline; on the positioning and status of EAP within the academy; and on the work carried out by EAP practitioners, particularly with regard to conceptualizations of professionalism, and understandings of what constitutes practitioner expertise. Drawing on qualitative data generated from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 internationally-recognised scholars from EAP, the study presents a particular history of the different stages and developments which have occurred in EAP, and maps how these have impacted not only upon EAP as a discipline, but also upon the work of its practitioners. Grounded in a series of narratives provided by individuals recognized for their key contributions to the field, the analysis utilizes ideas from socio-cultural theories developed by Becher (1989), Bernstein (1971) and Bourdieu (1977) to account for EAP’s current status and positioning in the academy. It then draws on theoretical concepts developed by Shulman (1986), Schön (1983), and Lave and Wenger (1991) to suggest ways in which EAP teachers build their knowledge and go about developing their particular professional expertise. The thesis proposes that EAP has now reached an important crossroads in its development. It argues that factors such as a poor appreciation for and understanding of EAP from within the academy at large; a lack of clarity and consistency around professional standards and teacher development within EAP itself; the current marketization of UK higher education and the resulting influx of private educational providers seriously threaten the longer-term security and future development of EAP within UK university contexts.

A unique, corpus-based methodology was created to determine reflexive construction metaphoricity. The method was able to retrieve metaphorically-expressed verbs, which were input into the verb slot of the reflexive construction in two online corpora. Results of the analysis show that some verbs have the ability to metaphorically construe different aspect of the self, one of them being perceptual self-awareness. The precise onset of perceptual self-awareness is usually sudden, reflected in the semantics of each of the verbs. This unexpected suddenness is a prime conceptual environment to cradle the construal of Self-Awareness as it emerges in cognition. Even though polysemy seems inherent within the data, corpus analysis shows that each has a unique collocational environment that helps delineate and differentiate collocational distinctions that can be supported by context in the form of the Focus of Awareness (FoA), i.e., the focus of the perceptual experience. Corpus data show that the FoA is a non-adjunctive, mandatory part of the conception. Data retrieval and analysis of collocational environments surrounding these metaphoric constructions are shown to be necessary components of this research methodology as a way to clarify fuzzy and/or borderline construals as they occur in actual language usage.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was a remarkably consistent advocate for the liberty of enslaved Africans and for the subjugated Italians during the first half of the nineteenth-century. She figured the oppression of the disenfranchised Europeans as an analogue of slavery and viewed antislavery in America and the Italian Risorgimento as part of the same problem stemming from imperial oppression. Despite the unresolved tensions between the emotional commitment to her slave-owing family and to abolitionism, her antislavery corpus – her juvenile abolition poems, her mature works on American slavery and her first volume of poems on the Italian independence – is always anti-imperialist. She engages with, borrows from, challenges and writes back to the mainstream abolitionist discourses of her predecessors and contemporaries to present an alternative image of the enslaved. This thesis considers how she combines the political-material conditions of individualised slave characters with real figures from the historical moment in her poetry, rendering them as actively resisting oppression and achieving their own liberation. Employing the rhetoric of incitement to violence, she encourages her readers to endorse the calls to resistance implied in the poems. My project demonstrates how Barrett Browning draws together the American antislavery movement and the Risorgimento into a single anti-imperialist cause, as part of her life-long commitment to political liberty.

This thesis examines the work of Tilly Kettle (1735-1786), the first professional British artist to work in India, and focuses on his portraiture in a quarter-century that saw Britain defeat European rivals during the Seven Years’ War, gain India, and lose America. One of an emergent group of artists responsible for creating a British school of portraiture, Kettle has never received a great deal of credit for his achievement, especially from art historians. Aside from J.D. Milner’s monograph in 1927, there has been no biographical appraisal of Kettle, who left no known writings but was a prolific artist, working in nonmetropolitan locations that have also received limited scholarly attention. This study uses Kettle’s paintings, primary evidence and newly discovered material to show how personal, artistic or national identities were being unsettled, reformed or re-framed during his day, and contends that portraiture reflected and impelled these changes, with social and cultural attitudes co-policed by empirical observation and aesthetic distinction. My analysis of Kettle’s artworks, the circumstances of their creation, and what can be inferred of his experience will relate him to these processes of identity formation, showing that he helped to shape debates as well as being controlled by them. In particular, I examine how his work influenced or echoed the motives behind national and imperial expansion. Kettle’s identity is seen as a three-part social construct: as a self-reflexive individual, as a national subject, and as a professional artist. My study timeframe allows a parallel view of history from Kettle’s perspective, connecting his key portraits with issues and events, from miraculous victories in 1759 to shock after American triumph in 1783. I conclude that Kettle’s art and career reflect an unfinished artistic self, patriotic but defensive, driven by the vagaries of taste, ambition and progress, and the futility of empire.

This research is designed to investigate the treatment of culture in education policies, teachers’ beliefs and the current practices of culture teaching in undergraduate English programmes in China, with a particular focus on the teaching of the culture-based course A General Survey of English-speaking Countries. This qualitative research involves documentation, interview and classroom observation as the main methodological tools for data collection. The National Curriculum for English Majors is analysed to find out how culture is treated in ELT education policies. 10 teachers from 10 higher institutions in Shanghai, China were interviewed and two individual case studies were carried out using interview and classroom observation data and other supplementary data. A model of multi-layered analysis is adopted. Through the triangulation of various methods and data sources, policy-making at the macro-level is linked to teachers’ perceptions of culture-teaching, then to their classroom practices at the micro-level. In this way analysis, description and explanation of how culture is being taught in English language programmes in China are provided. The findings of the current study suggest that: 1) the national guidelines for undergraduate English programmes have a clear intention for a strong commitment to promote students’ cultural understanding and intercultural communicative skills, but the impractical curricular policies can become potential constraints to the teaching of culture. In the process of interpretation, institutions and departments are not playing a sufficient part in curriculum and syllabus design and development, and teaching in the classroom is often without clear guidelines; 2) Teachers are increasingly aware of the dynamic and variable nature of culture, which academia strongly suggest should be incorporated into its teaching. However, concerning target cultures in ELT, teachers are predisposed to British and American cultures. They have encountered a series of challenges such as an overloaded syllabus, the overwhelming task of preparation, fear of lacking overseas experience and knowledge, lack of institutional support and relevant training, students’ lack of motivation and large classes. These challenges can be attributed to two major factors: the complex nature of culture teaching and the low status of culture-based courses in language programmes; 3) Teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and their cultural experiences have impact on their pedagogical choices. There are shared patterns as well as variations in teachers’ pedagogical approaches. The actual classroom practices are mostly teacher-centred and involve merely transfer of knowledge centred on the surface level of cultural knowledge. The cultures of the UK and the US are considered to be representative of the target cultures and dominate the content in teaching. In addition, the integration of culture and language in the classroom practices manifests itself in different ways. In one approach, language instruction is frequently inserted into teaching as it is considered to be one aspect of culture teaching. In another, and more common approach when culture teaching is equated with imparting cultural knowledge, teachers often give up English as the sole medium of instruction and make use of Chinese as a support for culture teaching. Furthermore, Chinese culture is also integrated to enhance cross-cultural comparisons and make culture teaching more efficient. The research findings have a number of implications for further study, as well as tentative suggestions for curriculum design and implementation, teacher education and teaching practices. It is hoped that they will provide a new perspective on the complexity and intricacy of the matter of culture teaching.

This is a study of diverse practices of representing, conducted at the intersection between historiographic and artistic practices. I follow traces left by the creative processes of artists from three different countries in their journeys to transform texts by women from the past into performances. Using an agential realist approach, my goal is to examine the productive effects of these artistic efforts, as well as the conditions under which each project took place and made sense. In Lancaster, England, The Tragedie of Euripides Called Iphigeneia, a Euripides play translated by Lady Jane Lumley in the mid 1550s, was chosen by the all-female Rose Company for their inaugural project in 2013. As part of the company's overarching effort to "redress the historical injustice by which women are sidelined, stereotyped, or forgotten," the production celebrated Lady Lumley as the author of the earliest extant dramatic work by a woman, and as the first person to translate into English an Ancient Greek play. In this case study, I focus on the company's bodily and rhetorical performances of gender, probing into the functions these have within the wider context of theatrical practice in England. In Mexico City, a very different focus guided performer and activist Jesusa Rodríguez in her work on the poem Primero Sueño. Written by the famous Baroque poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and first published in 1692, this poem has long been celebrated as one of the author's masterpieces. Indeed, Rodríguez started reading it because Sor Juana wrote elsewhere that Primero Sueño was her favorite work. But it is a difficult text, and Rodríguez had trouble understanding it. That is when she decided to simply memorize the poem, as a strategy to become more familiar with it. This process continued over the course of 15 years, and eventually, she produced live and televised performances to share the poem with the public. I discuss the role of time and recursiveness in her memorizing process, especially the discovery of new meanings in the poem when she was present in different places with different people. In Paris, a 2015 production brought Madame de Villedieu's play Le Favori to the stage for the first time in 350 years. It was an initiative of Aurore Evain, a theatre director and activist for gender equality in the arts. For Evain, the history of this play is representative of the disdain which works by women have been systematically subjected to in France. She believes that part of the solution to this problem is to bring the works by women from the past to the public of today, so I look into this production as an instance where an artistic practice becomes complimentary to the historiography of women in French theatre, by attending in particular to the emergence of meaning from the relationships between women in the play.