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In Scotland, where large numbers of immigrants come from non-English speaking countries, a national strategy exists to promote the effective provision of courses in English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), with a view to facilitating integration and participation in Scottish society. From a critical perspective, this vision implies an approach to ESOL that draws on theories of critical pedagogy, which seeks to create " ... an informed, critical citizenry capable of participating and governing in a democratic society" (Giroux 2011: 7). However, in a climate of neoliberal economic policymaking and the prioritisation of economic interests over social justice, there is pressure instead for education to " ... create an individual that is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur" (Olssen et al 2004: 136). Such pressure obliges learners to compete and function within social constructs, which entails an uncritical acceptance of existing structural inequalities and therefore runs counter to the principles of critical pedagogy. This dissertation focuses on ESOL provision in Scottish Further Education (FE) colleges, where the bulk of state-funded ESOL delivery takes place. The study explored perceptions among three key stakeholder groups – in policy, among practitioners and among learners – in order to examine the extent to which emancipation, as a social project, is perceived as an important feature of ESOL programmes. The research was composed of three parts: a policy analysis, which included a critical discourse analysis of the revised Adult ESOL Strategy for Scotland (Scottish Government 2015a), a study of the views of ESOL practitioners as expressed in responses to a questionnaire, and an analysis of the views of a group of ESOL learners, who participated in interviews. Critical interpretive analysis of the research data suggests that, despite an apparent awareness of the negative impact of existing power structures on the successful inclusion of immigrants into Scottish society, perceptions across all three stakeholder groups appear to support neoliberal ideology rather than a collective movement towards societal transformation. This finding implies that any potential for college ESOL programmes to emancipate learners is seriously undermined, or indeed removed completely. By taking a critical perspective, the research itself seeks to be emancipatory in attempting to expose the impact of these stakeholder perceptions on the extent to which social justice can be achieved for residents in Scotland whose first language is not English. The intention is for this dissertation to act as an interpellation. In the political sense, it challenges policymakers to explain and justify ESOL and FE policy in light of these research findings and their implications for social inclusion. The interpellation also extends to ESOL practitioners, calling on them to reflect critically on their praxis, the values inherent therein, and how these values impact on their learners.

In the last three decades, Speech Act Theory has been displaced from the spotlight of pragmatic research and relegated to the back seat of this field. This has been the case despite the potential this theory still has to serve pragmatic research. This study is an attempt to revive and develop speech act theory by means of applying it to interactive naturally-occurring discourse proposing a number of different types of speech act and incorporating into analysis a wider range of pragmatic IFIDs. The main purpose of the study is to: (1) investigate speech acts in interaction and find out which 'illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) are used to identify speech acts in an interactive context, and (2) compare the investigated speech acts and IFIDs cross-culturally between English and Arabic. Regarding data, the study investigated 12 English and Arabic short news interviews (six each). Some of these were video-recorded live from BBC and Sky news channels (English dataset) and Al-Arabiya, Sky news Arabia and Al-Wataniya channels (Arabic dataset). Other interviews were downloaded from YouTube. Two topics were the focus of these interviews: (1) the immigration crisis in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews), and (2) the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews). The study investigated the two datasets to find which speech acts are used in short news interviews and what interactional IFIDs are used to identify them. Results show that many different speech acts are used in news interviews — the study counted 48 individual speech acts in the analysed interviews. However, it was found that a mere itemizing and classification of speech acts in the classical sense (Austin‘s and Searle‘s classifications) was not enough. In addition, the study identifies various new types of speech acts according to the role they play in the ongoing discourse. The first type is termed turn speech acts‘. These are speech acts which have special status in the turn they occur in and are of two subtypes: 'main act' and 'overall speech act'. The second type is 'interactional acts'. These are speech acts which are named in relation to other speech acts in the same exchange. The third type is ̳superior speech acts‘. These are superordinate speech acts with the performance of which other subordinate (inferior) speech acts are performed as well. The study also found three different types of utterances vis-à-vis the speech acts they perform. These are 'single utterance' (which performs a single speech act only), 'double-edged utterance' (which performs two speech acts concurrently) and 'Fala utterance' (which performs three speech acts together). As for IFIDs, the study found that several already-established pragmatic concepts can help identify speech acts in interaction. These are Adjacency Pair, Activity Type, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Facework, Context (Co-utterance and Pragmalinguistic cues). These devices are new additions to Searle‘s original list of IFIDs. Furthermore, they are expanding this concept as they include a type of IFID different from the original ones. Finally, the study has found no significant differences between English and Arabic news interviews as regards speech acts (types), utterance types and the analysed IFIDs. The study attracts attention to Speech Act Theory and encourages further involvement of this theory in other genres of interactive discourse (e.g., long interviews, chat shows, written internet chat, etc.). It also encourages further exploration of the different types of speech acts and utterances discussed in this study as well as probing the currently-investigated and other IFIDs. It is hoped that by returning to the core insight of SAT (i.e., that language-in-use does things) and at the same time freeing it from its pragmalinguistic shackles, its value can be seen more clearly.

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English-medium instruction (EMI) is a growing trend in higher education around the world. In Japan, EMI has recently expanded dramatically and over one-third of Japanese universities now have EMI programs serving both international and domestic students. Amid this rapid growth, much of the EMI development has been ad hoc or characterized by difficult implementation. EMI stakeholders face critical linguistic, cultural, administrative, and institutional challenges. This study explores good practice in EMI programs in Japan by presenting a longitudinal view of four newly implemented undergraduate EMI programs. Findings indicate that the success of an EMI program depends on how stakeholders deal with issues related to program plarming and curriculum development. Effective communication among EMI stakeholders, and between program-level and university leaders, is a key factor in planning, as is the selection, recruiting, and support of faculty members. Stakeholders also need to be aware of the program's position in the university community and how program budgeting may influence its development. The curriculum must be designed based on a realistic understanding of students' incoming language proficiency and has to include effective means to measure and support that proficiency. EMI programs should also strive for internal coherence and meaningful connections to mainstream Japanese-medium programs.

Synaesthesia is an unusual phenomenon, in which additional sensory perceptions are triggered by apparently unrelated sensory or conceptual stimuli. The main foci of this thesis lie in speech sound - colour and voice-induced synaesthesia. While grapheme-colour synaesthesia has been intensively researched, few studies have approached types of synaesthesia based on vocal inducers with detailed acoustic-phonetic and colorimetric analyses. This approach is taken here. First, a thorough examination of speech-sound - colour synaesthesia was conducted. An experiment is reported that tested to what extent vowel acoustics influence colour associations for synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. Systematic association patterns between vowel formants and colour measures could be found in general, but most strongly in synaesthetes. Synaesthetes also showed a more consistent pattern of vowel-colour associations. The issue of whether or not speech-sound - colour synaesthesia is a discrete type of synaesthesia independent of grapheme-colour synaesthesia is discussed, and how these might influence each other. Then, two experiments are introduced to explore voice-induced synaesthesia. First, a comprehensive voice description task was conducted with voice synaesthetes, phoneticians and controls to investigate their verbal voice quality descriptions and the colour and texture associations that they have with voices. Qualitative analyses provided data about the nature of associations by the participant groups, while quantitative analyses revealed that for all groups, acoustic parameters such as pitch, pitch range, vowel formants and other spectral properties influenced colour and texture associations in a systematic way. Above all, a strong connection was found between these measures and luminance. Finally, voice-induced synaesthetes, other synaesthetes and controls participated in a voice line-up, of the kind used in forensic phonetic case work. This experiment, motivated by previous findings of memory advantages in synaesthetes in certain areas, tested whether synaesthetes’ voice memory is influenced by their condition. While no difference in performance was found between groups when using normal speech, voice-induced synaesthetes outperformed others in identifying a whispering speaker. These are the first group studies on the otherwise under-researched type of voice-induced synaesthesia, with a focus on acoustic rather than semantic analysis. This adds knowledge to the growing field of synaesthesia research from a largely neglected phonetic angle. The debate around (re)defining synaesthesia is picked up. The voice description experiment, in particular, leads to a discussion of a synaesthesia spectrum in the population, as many common mechanisms and associations were found. It was also revealed that less common types of synaesthesia are often difficult to define in a rigid way using traditional criteria. Finally, the interplay of different types of synaesthesia is discussed and findings are evaluated against the background of the existing theories of synaesthesia.

This thesis investigates teacher cognition of classroom interaction as represented in narratives by Amazonian language teachers. Language teacher cognition has been investigated in the great educational centres in Brazil, but has been overlooked as a research theme in Amazonas, the context of this study. In order to bridge this existing gap in language teacher research, the current study develops a narrative enquiry in the public and private school settings to find the different understandings of interaction in the English as a foreign language (heretofore EFL) classroom as articulated by teachers. The study is grounded in theories of teacher education and cognition, applied and socio-linguistics, socio-cultural theories and discourse analysis to further the understanding of concepts that are of rising importance in the EFL field: teacher cognition, classroom interaction, and narrative research. In brief, teacher cognition refers to teachers’ mental lives and to the ways they perceive their practice. In this research, four constructs (knowledge, thought, beliefs, and decision-making) are considered to represent the broad conceptualisation of teacher cognition. Classroom interaction corresponds to the collaborative moments which happen in the language classroom among students, or between students and teacher, in order to improve learning. Narrative enquiry relates to both the method and methodology which is used to understand diverse knowledge processes. In simple terms, in this thesis, narrative enquiry explores teachers’ stories about their practice and determines the ways in which they can be analysed and interpreted. This qualitative research has been designed from a constructionist epistemological standpoint and an interpretivist theoretical perspective. Because it investigates complex concepts, this research does not follow one specific philosophical background but finds inspiration in critical pedagogy and matters of knowledge in the Brazilian context. The data produced by nine experienced EFL teachers was systematically analysed. Starting from the four individual constructs of teacher cognition, the interpretation of the data develops to concepts and themes which emerged from this initial analysis. The findings generated new understandings of the construction of knowledge as personal practical knowledge (PPK) and its relationship to other constructs of teacher cognition, to experience, to the teachers’ individual contexts and to styles of storytelling. From these main findings, the present study proposes a model of narrativised teacher cognition to better understand the interrelation between the cognitive constructs and discursive strategies, as well as build a new and concrete dimension to teachers’ articulation of their practice.

The main goal of this research is to investigate the difficulties Libyan undergraduate university English major students have in the use of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations by looking at their performance in free production. Twelve verbs and twelve adjectives were investigated in depth with the aim of determining their collocational patterns when used by Libyan learners. Having done this, I also investigate whether there is a significant difference between native speaker ratings of English language learner collocations in academic as opposed to non–academic contexts. To achieve the main aim, a 250-word academic writing task was used to collect data from 186 fourth-year university students (90 males and 96 females) at Tripoli University (the Department of English, Faculty of Arts). The data was analysed using AntConc 3.2.1w (Anthony, 2007). After extracting the learners‟ collocations, four sources were used to determine and judge their acceptability in terms of conforming to native-like use. They are: (1) the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009), (2) the online British National Corpus (BNC), (3) consultations with two native speakers, and (4) a survey to triangulate the above three methods. Gass and Selinker's (2008) error analysis framework is adopted as the basis for analyzing the learners' collocational violations. In addition, quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. For example, the writing task data was analysed quantitatively in order to identify the frequency of learners' acceptable collocations, erroneous collocations and collocational errors, and qualitatively to identify various types of collocational errors and to determine the sources of learners' difficulty in producing collocations. In addition, a two-version acceptability survey (i.e. academic rating and non-academic rating) was administered to 100 native speakers of English in order to achieve the secondary aim. Furthermore, a student questionnaire and a lecturer questionnaire were used as a supportive method to explore collocation as a linguistic phenomenon from the learning and teaching perspectives. The participants were 155 students and 12 university lecturers. The results from the questionnaires are useful as they potentially suggest reasons why Libyan students have difficulty with collocations. In addition, they contribute to our understanding of how lecturers and students think collocations are taught and learned in the Libyan educational system. Findings from the academic writing data reveal that: (1) verb-noun collocations were more difficult for the participants than adjective-noun collocations; (2) independent samples t-test results showed that the participants' use of the twelve adjectives in the adjective-noun collocations showed significantly more accuracy level compared to their use of the twelve verbs in the verb-noun collocations. Therefore, the statistical investigations confirm that verb-noun collocations posed more difficulties for the participants than adjective-noun collocations.; (3) three broad categories of errors were identified in the erroneously produced verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations in the Libyan Learner Corpus (LLC): (i) grammatical errors, (ii) lexical errors and (iii) errors related to usage; and (4) eight main types of sources of difficulties are suggested, such as L1 interference – the negative influence of the mother tongue - and the use of synonymy. The results of the survey data reveal that there were significant differences in the native speakers‟ judgments in the academic rating survey and the non-academic rating survey. Finally, on the basis of these results, several recommendations are made in order to improve the teaching of collocations in EFL classes in the light of the obtained results.

Attitudes towards varieties of English have long been at the forefront of sociolinguistic research. Whilst most of these studies have concentrated on native varieties of English, in recent years, research has turned to non-native varieties that arose as English became the lingua franca across the globe. Research has demonstrated that whilst native varieties are generally viewed as being of a higher status, non-native varieties are sometimes considered more positively in terms of social attractiveness, or ‘solidarity’. However, in recent years, non-native speakers have begun to outnumber native English speakers, thus attitudes towards these speakers may be changing. This study contributes to research on attitudes towards native and non-native varieties of English by conducting a comparative investigation of the attitudes of 317 Taiwanese nationals living in Taiwan and 147 British nationals living in the UK towards different English accents. Online questionnaires utilising both direct (e.g., Likert scales and multiple-choice questions) and indirect (e.g., verbal guise test) methods were employed to examine Taiwanese and British attitudes towards varieties of English. The study examined seven varieties as categorised according to Kachru’s (1992a) three concentric circles: the Inner Circle: Australian English, General American English and Standard Southern British English; the Outer Circle: Indian English; and the Expanding Circle: Japanese English, Spanish English and Taiwanese English. Four key findings emerge from the study. First, both direct and indirect techniques of evaluation demonstrate that both Taiwanese and British respondents largely favour English varieties of the Inner Circle and the Outer Circle over those of the Expanding Circle. Second, the indirect attitude measurements of the verbal guise test demonstrate that both groups prefer the variety of General American English in terms of both status and solidarity. Third, the research found that a number of social variables (e.g., gender, occupation) had a significant effect on speaker evaluations. Fourth, although Taiwanese and British participants were very capable of distinguishing whether a speaker was native or non-native, there were generally no significant correlations between a speaker’s ability to identify different English varieties and their having a favourable attitude towards these. Overall, the findings demonstrated that Taiwanese and British people predominantly share similar attitudes towards varieties of English. Nevertheless, when the effects of the social variables and speaker identifications are considered, native and non-native speakers’ perceptions of different varieties of English might differ. These findings contribute to the understanding of the similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers’ attitudes towards varieties of English in the context of an increasingly globalised world and the rise of the non-native speakers of English therein.

There is strong evidence in the literature that communicative interaction approaches may be an appropriate method of teaching English language skills, particularly speaking. There is a long-standing deficiency at the school level in the Saudi context; that is, the English language curricula at that particular level are inflexible, and passive learning and traditional, teacher-centred teaching methods are used. However, English language teaching is more collaborative, interactive and communicative at the university level, which may contribute to the development of EFL communicative competence. This study aimed to interview fifty-five Saudi EFL students aged 18 to 21 in three institutions at the preparatory year at the university/college level with their 11 English teachers. These interviews sought to discover these participants’ perceptions regarding the L2 teaching and learning approaches that might support the EFL students to use the TL in communicative interaction situations in the classroom. Prior to this, they were observed in their proficiency level classes, with their lessons being recorded on video. These classroom observations supported the interviews and scrutinised the communicative interaction and the TL practices taking place in the TL classroom, in order to identify congruence and incongruence in the participants’ responses. These two methodological tools played an important role in achieving the aim of the study in exploring the use of the communicative interaction approaches and their activities in that stage. The data of this investigation were qualitatively analysed to give findings related to the employment of the communicative interaction approaches to using the TL through communicative interaction activities (CIAs). The findings suggest that the generation of a collaborative learning environment and CIAs appeared to be suitable for learners of English as a foreign language at the level examined in the higher education institutions in this study. Among the benefits of a collaborative learning environment and the use of CIAs are the development of speaking skills, the reduction of anxiety about speaking in class, and increased enjoyment and motivation to learn English. It was concluded that activities such as game-based, peer discussion and learners’ talk were suitable activities for EFL learners in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). These activities can also support the creation of an ‘authentic’ context, relevant to situations experienced by the EFL students in real life. It is therefore recommended that education policy makers in the KSA consider the inclusion of these activities in the curriculum and English language teachers’ application of these tasks using the TL in the language classrooms.