This thesis provides an original contribution to ongoing research on so-called Islamic State (‘IS’) by using a multiple case-study approach to offer an in-depth analysis of Arabic and English language narratives related to four atrocities committed by the group: (1) the mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, known as the Speicher massacre, (2) the captivity and sexual enslavement of Ezidi girls, known in Arabic as sabi, (3) the executions of a number of western, Arab, and Kurd victims, and (4) the destruction of cultural artefacts in Nineveh province. The analysis engages with the discourses of ‘IS’, western, Arabic, Iranian, and Kurdish media, survivors, ‘IS’s’ religious opponents, and other actors. The dissertation uses a social narrative theory as its conceptual framework that I seek to develop by focusing on the fragmentation in narratives, on one hand, and on the multimodal resources through which narratives circulate, on the other. To this end, I combine the theory with Boje’s (2001) notion of antenarrative and Kress’(2009) understanding of the three resources of discourse, genre, and mode, to investigate ways in which narratives first unfold and how they later change as they are translated. Translation is understood in the thesis as a multi-directional movement that simultaneously takes place across multiple resources without necessarily crossing language boundaries. The findings of this study reveal that the aforementioned resources contribute to transforming narratives. In translation, ‘IS’s’ narratives can be delegitimized and confronted, or the opposite. Examining the changes in these narratives as they are translated in multiple directions is a novel contribution to the field of translation studies in relation to the digital media environment.

This research investigates the writing of EFL university students at the English department of a major university in Syria. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical framework, the study applies Thematic analysis to students’ exam essays across two disciplines: language and literature, with the aim of exploring the differences in the language choices that students make in meeting the relevant disciplinary requirements. Another aspect of the study is to analyse student writing across different academic level with a view to identifying the nature of students’ developing writing maturity. Based on the assumption of an existing strong connection between the text and the broader context, the research investigates the possible influence of other contextual factors including the essay questions, model essays from the textbooks, and teacher’s views and perceptions. The findings from Thematic analysis point to the importance of interpersonal meaning in understanding this across-disciplinary variation in terms of building the argument and answering the essay question. The research shows potential pedagogical benefits in raising students’ awareness to the important function of different linguistic choices, particularly those with Thematic positions, in achieving the purpose of the text.

This thesis investigates competing representations of androgyny as grotesque and/or divine in selected works by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. The literary grotesque is a combination of incompatibles—such as the combination of masculine and feminine—which evokes simultaneous reactions of laughter and revulsion, while I define the divine as that which inspires awe and wonder through its otherworldliness. Throughout, the thesis examines figures such as physical or metaphorical hermaphrodites, eunuchs, Amazons, transvestites, the asexual, the pansexual, and those who transgress gender boundaries. The Introduction establishes historical contexts for physical and behavioural androgyny, the grotesque, and the divine. Each subsequent chapter close-reads one literary text: Chapter 1 examines place-based androgyny in Jonson’s Volpone; Chapter 2 explores Antonio/Florizel’s effect in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida; Chapter 3 analyses role-reversal in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; Chapter 4 investigates Ganymede’s magnetism and Rosalind’s wondrousness in As You Like It; and Chapter 5 evaluates Cesario’s invigoration in Twelfth Night. I argue for a progression in the degree of wonder evoked by androgynous figures, and an increase in these figures’ subjectivity and agency. My thesis is the first to explore the liberating unfixity of androgyny as funny, frightening, repulsive, and yet also potentially divine.

The national concern to improve the level of education in Malaysia prompted the Ministry of Education to conduct a comprehensive review of the education system and introduce the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2013-2025) to transform the education system. One of the aims was to upgrade the quality of in-service teacher training for teachers. This has resulted in a reshaping of the type of courses and delivery mode for in-service education for teachers (INSET). CPD providers in Malaysia tend to conduct training using the cascade model due to limited resources and expertise and teachers are hardly consulted about their needs or learning preferences. This is likely to have a significant impact on the quantity and quality of INSET for teachers in a top-down national priority driven system. This study examines the perceptions of a group of Malaysian English language educators, comprising primary school non-specialist English language teachers and senior teachers who are newly appointed School Improvement Specialist Coaches (SISCs) of their INSET experiences. It covers the areas of their previous INSET experiences and their perceptions of the effect of INSET on their classroom practice. The research also aims to identify their future expectations of INSET in terms of their professional development needs, their pupils' needs, school needs and their views on national needs of Malaysia's education system with reference to INSET. This research is informed by the qualitative survey approach which establishes variation in terms of values and dimensions that are meaningful within a certain population. The study focuses on diversity in a population of educators who attended INSET programmes on literacy, pedagogy and Language Arts. The methods that were used comprised focus group interviews and individual interviews. The researcher followed the INSET journey of three groups of primary school educators who were selected using convenience sampling and purposive sampling. The findings suggest a strong relationship between the educators' educational backgrounds, pre-service training, their knowledge of the English language subject and continuing professional development. These impact upon their teaching as a result of their understanding of the objectives in the Primary School Standard Curriculum document, their priorities and preferences in how to teach the English language, their culture and language. This study identifies gaps in different aspects of professional development especially on INSET needs for subject specific skills, pedagogical skills and collaborative learning through districtwide INSET and school-based INSET in Malaysia.

This is a multiple case study which investigates interaction around teachers’ corrective feedback on learners’ oral errors in three elementary English classrooms in Taiwan through classroom observations, teacher interviews, and learner interviews. In response to the problematic issues in existing corrective feedback research, this study has carried out an inductive microanalysis of the classroom data. The results indicate that current literature does not account for the complexity of the interaction around corrective feedback which is evidenced in the classroom data of this study. The findings of this study show a series of moves such as scaffolding, the use of nonverbal corrective feedback strategies, the use of objects as corrective feedback techniques, the use of clusters of corrective feedback strategies, deliberate language play by the learners, socialisation between the teacher and the learners as well as among learners as part of corrective feedback episodes. The findings of this study also reveal that corrective feedback can occur but takes a special shape in form-oriented classrooms. The features observed in the data of this study reflect a need to research into corrective feedback in elementary EFL classrooms as well as classrooms where the instruction focus of teachers is on linguistic forms.

Increasing numbers of Vietnamese students write in English as a foreign language for university and employment purposes. This research study explored the writing of ten higher education students in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. In the first of its kind in Vietnam, the study establishes the types of writing or genres, in English, that participants had undertaken over their life course. Although participants reported a significant standardisation of genres at lower levels of education, they had been expected to produce a wider range of genres at either undergraduate or MA level, or for employment purposes. This included the need to write for research, science and business purposes. Participants were generally ill-prepared to take on these writing challenges. The findings indicate that a form of genre needs-analysis and genre pedagogy at undergraduate level could be implemented to support English language teachers and students to scaffold writing activities and to help prepare graduates for the type of writing expected of them within MA-level courses and employment. The participants valued assignments and writing that helped them to develop their thinking; they appreciated learning to write in a way that would be useful for employment and academic study and were motivated by gaining high scores and receiving positive feedback from teachers. Having the opportunity to write about familiar topics in a more creative way was also highly regarded. Participants felt they had experienced challenges when they first engaged in critical thinking, when they had to brainstorm for ideas and when they wrote introductions. During writing activities, participants positioned themselves and their arguments as Vietnamese citizens with a sense of pride and loyalty to their national identity. Participants were audience aware and used only material that would be deemed socially and politically correct within Vietnam. Many features of the sociocultural context played a role in the genres participants had written, the writing processes they engaged in and their perceptions of writing activities. The prevalence of English as a lingua franca and international research-writing conventions were evident. Traditional teaching approaches and grammar-based assessment and testing practices within Vietnam also featured significantly in participant’s experiences of writing in English. These structural forces, as well as other historical, cultural and political realities presented themselves more evidently than personal or idiographic in the writing experiences and writing processes of the participants.

The purpose of this study was to develop the Talk Skills pedagogic intervention, implemented in the Korean adult L2 learning context, which aims to raise awareness of effective L2 talk and teach oral communicative strategies that help students to achieve it. The study is underpinned by theories that foreground the importance of language use in L2 classrooms, focusing, most importantly, on the relationship between interaction and second language acquisition, and sociocultural theory for language learning. Review of the literature showed that students had the best opportunities for language learning when classroom talk embodies characteristics such as students giving opinions, offering reasons, sharing information, respectfully challenging each other, attempting to reach agreement, negotiating meaning, noticing and building upon gaps in their language and promoting language learning through scaffolding and emergent language. This type of talk is termed here exploratory talk for language learning. However, research into the Korean context showed that Korean L2 learners encounter problems with classroom group oral interaction that inhibit the production of this kind of talk and that may lead to unfulfilled potential for learning. This led to the hypothesis that adult Korean L2 learners could benefit from lessons that raise awareness of this kind of talk and learn strategies to help achieve it. Drawing on previous attempts at metacognitive awareness raising of effective classroom talk, as well as literature on oral communicative strategy training, the Talk Skills intervention was developed using a design-based research (DBR) methodology. The scope of the project was limited to exploring the soundness and local viability of the intervention, using lesson transcript data, student interview feedback, my own field notes and expert appraisal from my course tutors to refine the intervention across two iterations. Initial impact of the project was also explored by analysing feedback from a small number of teachers who have used elements of the intervention in their adult English language courses. Taken as a whole, this thesis argues that Korean adult L2 learners can benefit from metacognitive awareness raising of exploratory talk for language learning and the learning of oral communicative strategies to help achieve this kind of talk. The thesis further argues that this aim can successfully be achieved using a design-based research methodology to both develop the Talk Skills intervention as a pedagogic tool, and further offer specific insight into instructional techniques, student engagement and teacher’s interactional roles that aid the success of its implementation. Finally, this thesis argues that as DBR is an underutilized methodology in the field of L2 research, the Talk Skills project offers a useful example of DBR for practitioner researchers wishing to embark on intervention design and development.

This thesis examines professionalism of English language teaching (ELT) in one particular setting, the state of Kerala in southern India. It reveals that there is an independent and unrecognised professionalism amongst ELT professionals in the setting. This includes a lack of recognition of the efficacy of methods and approaches traditionally used in the setting and a lack of recognition of the informal professional development that is happening in the setting. This professionalism is unrecognised by local ELT professionals because of their belief in ‘Western TESOL’. I am only able recognise it when I learn, through an autoethnography of my own professionalism, to put aside my own preoccupations with ‘Western TESOL’. The initial objective of this study was to attempt to gain insights into local perspectives surrounding ELT methodology and teacher education, set against a background of a perceived need for methodological change in the setting. However, once the study had begun, it became clear that my own professional background and experiences, my ‘Western TESOL’ ‘professional baggage’, combined with the fact that I was coming into the setting as an outsider, seeing it through distant eyes, was affecting the ways in which I was viewing the setting and interpreting the events happening within it. As I began to offload some of this ‘professional baggage’, realising that my ‘Western TESOL’ understanding of the setting did not necessarily match local participants’ understandings of it, I began to question and re-evaluate the data I had collected. For example, I realised that I was focusing on what I saw as the negative aspects of what I was observing and being told about ELT in the setting, and comparing these to approaches to ELT in ‘Western TESOL’ settings that I was more familiar with. Over time, I began to look at these same aspects in a more positive light, seeing different perspectives and valuing what I was seeing or being told in different ways. My re-evaluations of the data from the setting over time also thus became a focus of the study. The study as a whole is therefore ethnographic in terms of attempting to understand local perspectives, using open-ended questionnaire, classroom observation, interview and field note data, with an autoethnographic dimension to acknowledge the influence of my own distant eyes perspective in understanding these local perspectives. It brings into focus how I, as a researcher, through re-evaluating my own data and as a result gaining greater insight into my own positioning, was able to give credit to different perspectives on the data collected, particularly the data from classroom observations and teacher accounts of practice, and in the light of this to offer possible ways forward for ELT in the setting. It has implications for local ELT professionals in terms of understanding and appreciating their own professionalism. It also has implications for TESOL professionals in unfamiliar settings in terms of the need to understand the complexity of these settings, rather than make hasty judgments about local practices, particularly in the case of ‘Western TESOL’ professionals working in ‘non-Western TESOL’ settings. It may therefore be of interest both to ‘Western’ teachers, teacher trainers and academics working or researching, or intending to work or carry out research, in settings with which they are not familiar, particularly ‘non-Western TESOL’ settings, and to local TESOL professionals and academics in the setting for the study.

This research is motivated by the need for a better understanding of the nature of student-centred interactions in university settings. Although there is now a considerable amount of research into written academic English, studies of spoken academic English, particularly of student-centred, disciplinary-specific events, are still relatively few in comparison. This work aims to go some way towards redressing the balance. The study provides a description of a variety of linguistic features of one type of speech event, problem-based learning sessions (PBLs), within the context of a postgraduate programme in Medical Genetics. PBLs are underpinned by a very clear pedagogy driving their incorporation into academic programmes: through a cycle of tutorials, individual research and presentations, students develop content knowledge and the skills thought essential for the professional practitioner. Although common within the field of medicine, there has been relatively little research into how the discipline and pedagogy are realised linguistically. This study analyses a specially compiled corpus of five complete PBL cycles, each with two stages. It comprises over 12 hours of speech, approximately 115,000 words and is searchable as a whole and for each stage. By applying a variety of approaches, including Conversation Analysis (CA), Corpus Linguistics, and aspects of Discourse Analysis, this allows for a more detailed and fine-grained analysis of student discourse than one approach alone. Applying CA, the study identifies features of the overall organisational structure and the different patterns of talk found in each stage. Academic functions common to the stage two presentations are also identified. The corpus-based analysis investigates three specific linguistic areas: keyword analysis is used to explore vocabulary as a marker of the discipline and approach, personal pronouns as markers of engagement, and the structural and discourse functions of lexical bundles. The investigation into how the interactions unfold and the consideration of keywords reflect the discipline and underlying epistemology of PBL sessions. Clear differences in the frequency and use of personal pronouns and lexical bundles are evident in each stage, indicating that both the mode (spoken) and the nature of each speech event (highly interactive exchanges or presentations) affect linguistic choices. This study of a bespoke corpus provides an in-depth analysis of a disciplinary-specific, student-centred speaking event. This may be useful for EAP teachers and task and materials designers working with students on pre-sessional programmes who need academic language support. Methodologically it adds to the growing number of studies taking a multidimensional approach (i.e. in methodology and focus) to understanding spoken academic discourse.

Language is the tool of tools, essential to our identities as individuals and as a species. All living languages change continuously, and people are responsible for that change, primarily to express identity and build relationships (Trask, 2010). This thesis is about language, English Language Teaching (ELT), and in particular the evolving identities and development of Speakers of Other Languages Teaching English (SOLTEs). It is presented against a contemporary backdrop of globalisation and complex forces of sociocultural and educational transformation, which influence the field of language and identity research. English in the early 21st century is indisputably the world's Lingua Franca (Ostler, 2010), in that billions of people use it alongside thousands of other languages: a growing majority of its speakers are thus defined as 'non-native'. There is a similar pattern in the proportions of teachers: the majority are local to their professional context, share the first language of their students, and work in mainstream school systems. Crystal (2003) expresses an ideal balance between multilingualism and a globally-intelligible world language. This also implies the presence of multilingual, multicompetent language practitioners, and it is these people who stand at the centre of the study. The thesis addresses the following related research questions: 1. What does it mean for Speakers of Other Languages Teaching English (SOLTEs) to say: 'I am an English teacher'? 2. How do these multilingual, multicultural teachers develop their identities and what influences their professional practice and beliefs? 3. What are the implications of the globalisation of English for the field of English Language Teaching, and the impact on the position of SOLTEs? In exploring these questions, the study aims to discover more about these ELT practitioners' attitudes towards the definition of their subject, and the development of their own multiple identities in relation to the language they teach, its learning and use. For example, do teachers see language as essentially a body of knowledge to be taught and learnt, or a social practice, a set of skills to be acquired and developed? To what extent does their own language learning experience condition their beliefs and teaching approach? How do they see themselves in terms of professional competence and personal confidence? In short, who do they think they are? The study uses semi-structured interviews and online discussion with a small group of six teachers based in various European ELT contexts, including the UK. The research methodology is participative and interpretative, designed to be relevant to the central questions and the individuals involved. An inductive approach to qualitative data analysis is adopted, where meaning is uncovered and categorised through a process of iterative engagement with the raw narrative texts produced with the participants. The aim is to present a fuller picture and tell a credible and interesting story. In answer to the question 'Who do you think you are?' the participants claim both competence and confidence as English language teachers, yet also express self-doubt and reservations towards a still-powerful 'native' model that they themselves increasingly question. The implications of this study suggest that the field of ELT needs to move away from debates on 'nativeness', 'ownership' and idealised norms, towards notions of 'beyond-native' language competence, a 'multilingual principle' for teaching and learning, and more appropriate teacher education programmes. Pedagogical targets for all living languages also change continuously, as do people's local communicative needs and identity claims, in a globalised world where multicompetent teachers can act as role models for their learners. If these new realities are recognised, a pedagogy for the 21st century can evolve which embraces teachers' and learners' multiple identities, as part of Crystal's (2003) ideal world of mutual understanding, where English in its infinite varieties and idiolects can sit alongside all other languages.