This case study used a mixed method approach to explore the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language through the medium of a new online synchronous programme (CentrEM) at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. Information was collected using questionnaires (240 students) personal interviews (8 students and 4 teachers) and observations (30 online classes). A case was identified in which technology supported a restricted approach to online English language learning based mainly on grammar, listening, reading, and writing. Female learners were disadvantaged because they were not encouraged to speak in English. The Internet was used mainly as a platform for instruction and to provide access to limited learning materials (mainly the online course book). Most participants expressed optimism for the potential opportunities of e-learning; however, student attendance was relatively low and active participation was limited. Encouraging student participation was a major issue. The teachers used numerous affective strategies to persuade the students to participate; however, technological difficulties intruded at regular intervals, disrupting the flow of communication and preventing the teachers from knowing who was present. Some students were less skilled in computing and English language than others, further disrupting the classes. A traditional teacher-centred face-to-face classroom strategy was adapted for online instruction. The flow of information was mainly from the teacher to the student, with emphasis on low level recall, encouraged by prompts. The students did not engage in deep learning. There were few opportunities for the students to enter into extensive dialogues with the teachers or to be reflective. The teachers did not use feedback adaptively to plan a differentiated approach. The curriculum was not flexible enough take into account the different abilities, learning styles, and preferences of each individual student. Recommendations are provided for learners, teachers, and the institution to help develop the online programme in the future.

This thesis reports on two action research cycles conducted in the English Department of the Higher Language Institute at Tishreen University, Syria. With the problem of global coursebooks that are pre-determined for learners, the aim of this action research was to use supplementary internet materials that could better meet learners‘ personal needs and interests in the context. In the first cycle, the plan was to get learners live access internet materials within the Tishreen Higher Language Institute. However, technical problems were experienced. They necessitated developing appropriate internet methodology for using internet materials in the context. In the second cycle, the internet was accessed via outside computers to bring supplementary materials to the language classroom. Both the appropriateness and the effectiveness of using supplementary internet materials were investigated. Qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were used. The action research process of developing context-appropriate methodology was found to be supportive of learners‘ engagement. Using internet materials appropriately created the conditions for learners‘ behavioural, cognitive, affective, and social engagement with internet materials.

Over the last two decades, many ELT professionals and researchers have called for contextually appropriate forms of ELT pedagogy to be developed, arguing that the dominant discourse on ELT methodology, as promoted by local Ministry of Education (MoE) policy makers around the world, has been largely generated in ideal (North) contexts and so does not reflect the challenging realities of the majority of language teaching and learning contexts in which they are being imposed. Despite these calls, there has been very little research that shows how contextually appropriate ELT pedagogies can be developed. To fill this gap, there is a need for research that develops from the bottom-up by relying on input from teachers and learners who constitute the major stakeholders in the teaching and learning process. This study, therefore, set out to investigate students' and teachers' perspectives regarding what counted as good and appropriate English language teaching in two English medium primary school contexts in Cameroon. To achieve this, data was collected through classroom observation, friendship group interviews with children and stimulated recall with teachers from six English medium primary schools from Yaounde and Buea. A further two-day workshop group discussion based on videoed lessons from the six classrooms was organised with 30 teachers in both research sites. The findings of this study revealed that teachers and students possess shared, but also - in some respects - divergent notions of good/appropriate ELT pedagogy which are largely different from MoE enforced methodological procedure, and it is these notions - rather than what the Ministry says - that have the biggest impact on their experiences and practices. The study also revealed that, in exploring insights into their, as well as students’ perspectives on good teaching, teachers in the workshops were able to develop new ideas about appropriate teaching which took on board ideas from children’s perspectives as well as successful practices from the videoed lessons of their colleagues. These findings highlight the potential contribution of a bottom-up research approach to teacher development which takes account of context in the process of generating and disseminating good practice.

Some football fans go to matches, but what do others do? This thesis examines online football fan forums in order to explore the construction of fan identities and positions. By implementing a cyberethnographical approach supplemented by online interviews with fans, it explores how football fan communities operate, discussing aspects of forum management, control and hierarchies, all the while illustrating how these factors contribute to the development of individual and collective identities. In considering this, it presents football fans as inhabiting a multitude of complex positions, taking into account arguments of 'active' and 'passive' fandom and the importance of fan status (Hills, 2002.) I argue that that there has been a significant lack of research into 'everyday' football fandom, with both the mainstream media and academic perspectives preferring to focus on the extraordinary instances of performance and behaviour, which, I further argue, are simplistic in their treatment of fans. Mainstream media representations are addressed; with the latter sections of the thesis illustrating that discourses produced by fans themselves often contrast significantly with dominant narratives at play in the news media. The football fan is found to demonstrate articulate consideration for his/her own position, with this being frequently determined by the overriding importance of the team's success and the part that the fan plays in this. This is particularly apparent when considering national and regional allegiances, and how these can be seen to present regular areas of conflict in regards to dominant affiliation, yet all the while contributing to the fan's position as an extension of the football club.

Cults are negatively regarded. The way in which they persuade people to join their movements is particularly criticised by, for example, the anti-cult movement. Cults do use language in specific ways to recruit new members. There are, however, other groups who use language similarly, for recruitment purposes, but without stigmatisation. A new framework for rhetorical analysis, incorporating both classical tradition and contemporary work in text analysis, is particularly useful at demonstrating this. This thesis develops such a framework and uses it to analyse the rhetoric of three cults, Scientology, The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Children of God, showing that cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself. Not only does this analysis increase our understanding of rhetoric, it paves the way for new questions to be asked about the pejoration of cults.

The present thesis seeks to examine the grammatico-pragmatic problem of translating modality from English into Arabic (two formally and genetically different languages) and vice versa, with the aim of suggesting tentative ways that would tackle such a problem for the Arab translator who finds himself/herself in a situation where only specific choices of TL modal expressions would make the translation acceptable. Translating is regarded, here, as an overall operation performed on two languages - an operation based on a systematic comparison of two linguistic systems and the functions they each perform at a higher level. It is taken to mean a code-switching operation, which implies that a sequence of symbols from one language is substituted for a sequence of symbols in another. This code-switching always operates as a chain with an intervening time occupied by a segment of interpretation during which the intended content is transferred into the target language by the translator. In this study, use is made of concepts and terminology provided by linguistics and translation theory, both of which deal with language as a communicative activity. The research conducted here deals with translation between Arabic and English, with special focus on modality as a linguistic as well as a cultural strategy of communication. Therefore, modality can be constructed in the TL only through overall translation by interpretation where equivalence becomes the translator's memory rather than his/her dictionary. Here, the overall process of translating the modal content thrives best by freeing itself from surface constraints, i.e. constraints imposed by the surface structure of the source text.

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 investigated reading comprehension, reading fluency and attitudes of students after exposure to extensive reading (ER), an approach to teaching and learning foreign languages without using a dictionary or focusing on grammar, but aiming to get learners to read extensively by choosing books on their own, for general comprehension, good reading habits and enjoyment (Day and Bamford 1998; Prowse 1999). It was conducted in the Thai context with English as foreign language (EFL) students at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (RMUTT) in Thailand during a period of four months, one academic semester. The teaching procedure conformed to the principles of ER with a wide-ranging selection of graded reader books. Multiple measurements used to assess comprehension with three narrative texts were written recall protocol, and translation tests; multiple choice questions with twelve texts in timed reading to assess reading fluency; and a survey questionnaire as well as an in-depth interview to gather data on attitudes towards extensive reading. The study employed a double-control pre- and post-test (Solomon) design: two experimental groups (N = 52 and 50) and four control groups (N = 46, 48, 42, and 46) of which two are excluded from the pretest to separate out the effects caused by using the same instruments. The findings suggest positive effects of ER on the learners’ reading comprehension and provide conclusive evidence of reading fluency improvement together with a positive attitude towards ER. The study also revealed that credit or score is a key factor to encourage students to read and they preferred reading in a controlled situation in class including taking the tests of timed reading. The thesis discusses the possibility of using testing as a pedagogical tool for the improvement of reading skills. Implications drawn from the findings suggest that in order to maximize the benefits of ER, an adjustment of procedures is essential prior to the integration with language courses in the Thai and other similar contexts.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate effective ways of designing taskbased collaborative writing lessons in the EFL classroom in South Korea. In this research, a group of 11/12 year-old children were involved in repeating three different writing tasks three times. In order to examine the effects of task type and task repetition on task performance and outcomes, written texts were measured in terms of fluency, accuracy, and lexical complexity with seven sub-measures and pair dialogues were quantified by the focus on a particular aspect of the language and then categorised into form-focus, lexical-focus, and mechanical-focus language-related episodes. Follow-up interviews were undertaken with the children to examine their perspectives on collaborative writing from their first experience of paired writing. On the basis of self-reflection on my prior learning and teaching experience in the EFL context, a classroom action research project was designed and conducted to promote my personal and professional growth. Classroom observation was undertaken to monitor the children’s performance and engagement when working together. The results of quantitative and qualitative data analysis showed strong effects of task type and task repetition on the products and processes of Korean children’s writing and the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing. In addition, this teacher research gave me a valuable opportunity to explore ways of becoming a reflective teacher. The research findings may help classroom teachers who want to develop task-based collaborative writing lessons in the classroom and teacher researchers who want to initiate classroom action research to improve their teaching practice.

This thesis explores how students who spoke English as an additional language (EAL) learned to write in a new discourse community, the difficulties they encountered and the changes that occurred in their perceptions of academic writing and of themselves as academic writers. The existing literature reported that learning to write disciplinary assignments is an interactional and dynamic process, encompassing not only writing and reading but also social interactions occurring among novice and more experienced members of the discourse community. Nevertheless, previous studies suggested that HE institutions still tend to hold narrow views on academic writing and to provide little attention to its teaching. Essentially, many studies are limited because they have examined how isolated factors (i.e. tutor written feedback or use of guidelines) impacted on student writing, overlooking the complexity of interactions that can come into play and influence student writing. This research adopted a longitudinal case study to investigate in-depth the writing experiences of five EAL students. To conduct this exploratory project, I employed constructivist and interpretivist approaches and multiple methods such as selfcompletion questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and analysis of tutors‘ feedback sheets and handbooks. This project suggests that indeed learning to write in HE was an active and dynamic process, encompassing interactions with members of the discourse community (tutors, peers and teacher-assistants), with the training system (taught module courses, writing assignments, academic writing class, CELTE support) and with institutional artefacts (samples of previously written work, published guidelines and assessment criteria). Despite a number of literacy practices designed to make the departmental conventions and expectations transparent, there was a level of invisibility of the conventions students were expected to adopt in their writing. As a result, students‘ writing experiences were fraught with tensions and conflicts that influenced their perceptions of academic writing and of themselves as academic writers.