The stimulus for this study was problems I encountered in my teaching of academic writing to first year undergraduates majoring in English at a Moroccan university. Their problems ranged from sentence, to paragraph to essay levels. Added to that was my realization that the teaching of writing is mainly product-oriented and that practice is far from theory. Students are expected to produce good writing, but the means for helping them attain the required writing standards are not clearly identified or provided. A focus on narrative writing seems not to serve the purpose of training students to make their voices heard in argumentative writing. Reliance on lecturing as a means of teaching writing robs the writing class of an appealing social environment. These problems combined with a personal desire to improve my teaching by researching my professional practice against the insights of theory; all these factors gathered to stimulate me to undertake the present research. This project is based on the teaching of a writing programme I developed based on my previous experience as a writing teacher and on student need. In its progressive teaching of writing the programme follows a process approach; however, the product perspective is also important. Students are exposed to three types of feedback on multiple-draft writing: self-monitored feedback using annotations; peer feedback; and teacher written feedback and taped commentary. The aim is to encourage them to experience writing as an interactive process, from the pre-writing activities through the actual writing and revising to the writing of a final draft, rather than as a monotonous solitary activity performed under exam pressure. Using a case study approach this qualitative inquiry looks into the extent to which students make use of the different types of feedback in their revisions, their attitudes to the feedback procedures, and whether text quality improves over the drafts during the course period. For this purpose various data collection tools have been used. These include questionnaires, in-depth interviews, students' writings, audio-taped recordings of student peer feedback sessions, teacher written and taped comments, and student diaries. In line with previous research, the present study has shown that self-monitored feedback using annotations can help identify problematic areas in writing, but it has also added that annotations can unveil students' perceptions of what constitutes good writing. Moreover, the study has demonstrated that peer feedback activities are not only helpful in terms of encouraging revision but that they have other cognitive, linguistic and affective benefits. Finally, there is strong evidence that teacher written feedback is still considered by students to be a major source of help and that they do take it into consideration in their revisions. In addition, teacher taped commentary, a type of feedback which has received little attention in the literature, is an effective means of commenting on content and organisation and focusing student revision on these areas. Students have also appreciated it and acknowledged its cognitive, linguistic, affective, and practical benefits. Furthermore, the study has shown that although students' writings have not systematically, and regularly, improved from first to second drafts, i. e. after revision following peer feedback, there is a tendency for improvement from second to third drafts. i. e. after revision following teacher feedback. On the whole, improvement in text quality varied from one student to another and also from one draft to another for the same student. The main implications are that the one-draft writing tendency in the context of the study should give way to multiple-draft writing. The motivating force of revision can be promoted and enhanced through the use of different types of feedback on separate drafts. More importantly; however, the writing class should cater for student need by making use of motivational instructional and feedback activities.

This study is an investigation of the potential of teacher-initiated action research for EFL/ESP teacher development and classroom innovation. The Collaborative Academic Writing Research Project (CAWRP), on which it is based, was carried out at the ESP Centre, Damascus University, in 1996-1997. It was in two phases, Baseline and Main. The researcher, a teacher in the context, assumed a participatory and facilitating role. The pedagogic problem was the teaching of research paper writing to postgraduate students. The CAWRP was proposed to ease this problem and introduce classroom innovation through teacher-initiated action research, the long-term aim of which was continuous professional development. The baseline research aimed at articulating a picture of teacher and context needs and assessing project viability. The proposal was refined in the light of the findings, and a programme of teacher development activities was agreed with the participants. This was implemented in the Main Phase, which had three stages: Orientation, Research and Reporting, and Summative Evaluation and Follow-up. The role of the researcher was to facilitate the teachers to self-direct their professional learning and introduce needed pedagogic innovations. The thesis is in eight chapters and 32 appendices. Chapter One sets the scene and introduces the study. Chapter Two focuses on the baseline investigation: its methodology, findings, and their implications for the Main Phase study. Chapter Three is a review of the relevant literature in the fields of teacher development and classroom innovation. Chapter Four focuses on project design and methodology and gives more details on the principles, values, strategies, and procedures that guided project implementation and how they worked out in action. Chapter Five reports the findings, focusing on the contribution of the Orientation Stage activities to the development of the teacher group as a whole (a total of 20 out of 23 Centre teachers). Its main sources of data are recordings, feedback questionnaires, and participant observation. Chapter Six focuses on the teachers who carried out action research and reported on it (8 out of the 20 Orientation Stage participants). It presents two case studies of frill participants, starting with their entry points and showing how they developed in the Research and Reporting Stage. One case exemplifies the experienced teachers and those who did research individually, and the other the novices and those who worked in collaboration. Chapter Seven reports on the participants' sununative evaluation of the project and the effect of this evaluation on project continuity. Chapter Eight summarises the main findings and evaluates them with reference to the literature, on the one hand, and design principles and methodology, on the other. In this chapter, I have looked critically at the lessons learnt from the study, discussed its significance and limitations, and put forward some recommendations. The appendices include some of the materials and documentary evidence used in the research.

If you ask a group of people "What are the qualities of a good teacher?" they are more likely to say that a teacher must be knowledgeable, compassionate, firm and fair. If you ask the same group of people "How do we prepare teachers to have all those good qualities?" you are more likely to get as many suggestions as there are people in the group. We all seem to agree on the quality teacher we want but we are less in agreement about the ways in which we might achieve those objectives. Over the years several models of teacher education have been suggested. These models testify to the continuous search for the best way to prepare teachers. There are varying viewpoints on whether teachers are better prepared if they spend more time in school so that their knowledge is acquired through practical means or whether teachers should receive sufficient knowledge on campus studies before they are let loose. What is sufficient theoretical and practical knowledge for the beginning teacher anyway? Do we know enough about how the participant on the teaching program makes sense of the knowledge acquired from the program when against his/her life experiences? This study explores the process of learning to teach by eight young women on the B.Ed degree link program as they prepare themselves to become English language teachers for secondary schools in Malaysia. The study follows their progress as they make the transition to beginning teachers. Specifically, the study explores the construct of their beliefs about teaching and learning prior to teaching practice, during teaching practice and in the post-training situation. Discussion of the findings from this longitudinal study is followed by recommendations for improving the preservice program and the support for beginning teachers in the novice year of teaching.

This thesis investigates how the strong verb system inherited from Old English evolved in the regional dialects of Middle English (ca. 1100-1500). Old English texts preserve a relatively complex system of strong verbs, in which traditionally seven different ablaut classes are distinguished. This system becomes seriously disrupted from the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods onwards. As a result, many strong verbs die out, or have their ablaut patterns affected by sound change and morphological analogy, or transfer to the weak conjugation. In my thesis, I study the beginnings of two of these developments in two strong verb classes to find out what the evidence from Middle English regional dialects can tell us about their origins and diffusion. Chapter 2 concentrates on the strong-to-weak shift in Class III verbs, and investigates to what extent strong, mixed and weak past tense and participle forms vary in Middle English dialects, and whether the variation is more pronounced in the paradigms of specific verbs or sub-classes. Chapter 3 analyses the regional distribution of ablaut levelling in strong Class IV verbs throughout the Middle English period. The Class III and IV data for the Early Middle English period are drawn from A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the data for the Late Middle English period from a sub-corpus of files from The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The Middle English Grammar Corpus. Furthermore, The English Dialect Dictionary and Grammar are consulted as an additional reference point to find out to what extent the Middle English developments are reflected in Late Modern English dialects. Finally, referring to modern insights into language variation and change and linguistic interference, Chapter 4 discusses to what extent intra- and extra-linguistc factors, such as token and type frequency, stem structure and language contact, might correlate with the strong-to-weak shift and ablaut levelling in Class III and IV verbs in the Middle English period. The thesis is accompanied by six appendices that contain further information about my distinction of Middle English dialect areas (Appendix A), historical Class III and IV verbs (B and C) and the text samples and linguistic data from the Middle English text corpora (D, E and F).

This study initially aims to draw up a plan for the implementation of the concept of translation strategies in translation training. It presents a new method to improve translation competence in an educational context. Moreover, it is an attempt to determine how the application of different facets of the concept of competence can lead us to establish an effective plan for translation training courses in any environment. This will be sought for through the analysis of more significant strategies in terms of educational value and through a novel methodology. The scope of the concept of strategies for pedagogical purposes is initially identified, while various considerations of the same term within the discipline are examined. As an important related notion, the issue of translation universals and their link to corpus-based translation studies are presented before introducing and developing a strategy-based translation training model. In order to recognise the educational significance of strategies, i.e. to find and classify the degree of the importance of translational solutions for any language pair, an analytical paradigm is proposed. The paradigm is based on the relation between the frequency of the occurrence of each strategy, on the one hand, and the average scores which are given to that strategy by the raters, on the other and examined through English-into-Persian translation practice in an academic setting. As the theoretical framework of the study, the main categorisation of translation problems proposed by Baker (1992/2011) and slightly revised by González Davies (2004) is analysed and modified based on different theoretical discussions as well as the findings of the mentioned paradigm. Though, the ultimate goal of this study has not been confined to the two languages involved, the researcher has reached some important findings for English-Persian pair through such an exposure. Baker’s primary categorisation that sees translation problems ‘at word level’ and ‘above word level’ is extended by adding a new category, ‘at the level of non-lexical items’, by considering difference and less popularity of using punctuation marks in languages like Persian as the target language. In the second degree, and according to the analysis of academic translation data, new subcategories are added to her list, while the importance of some of her subcategories is not observed in reality of current students’ works. Therefore, by introducing and testing a problem-strategy paradigm, the areas of educational significance of translation strategies are demonstrated, not only by re-defining the Baker-Davies’ model but also by proving the practicality of the methodology. On the whole, the research has aided to explore a developed strategy-based translation training model by linking the principal concepts categorized as: ‘translation strategies’, ‘translation competence’ and ‘paradigm of educational significance’.

This thesis is the first thorough investigation into the phenomenon known as the Burns Supper. This has grown spontaneously over the years from a nine man dinner at Burns Cottage, Alloway in July 1801 which marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Robert Burns, to over 3,500 dinners embracing more than nine million people across the world during the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 2009. The original event took the form of a convivial club dinner, typical of that period and using invented ritual paying homage to Freemasonry, key elements were grafted onto the running order which remain core today: notably a toast to Burns (‘the Immortal Memory’), poetically addressing (and eating) a haggis and performing Burns’s songs and poems including Auld Lang Syne. While the other contemporary societies and annual literary dinners have fallen into desuetude, the Burns Supper has exhibited longevity and a growth in scale annually that is exceptional. The success of the format is three-fold. First, the Burns Supper remains a social and convivial party; secondly, there is a greater degree of flexibility in how it can be arranged than is often recognised; and finally, the few mandatory elements are key to understanding Burns’s own imperative to be recognised as ‘Bard’ within a milieu which calls for participation. The original Burns Suppers recognised this and deliberately utilised Burns’s most performative verse to capture the spirit of his oeuvre and by incorporating that bardic quiddity, the Burns Supper two hundred years later still shares that fundamental experience which is essential to its immediacy and integrity as a vehicle for the appreciation of Robert Burns. By detailed study of the original minutes of the early suppers, combined, for the first time, with extensive newspaper reports, club archives and biographical sources, the expansion of participation in the Burns Supper from friends of the poet through to Scots at home or expatriate, to the wider global audience is tracked and analysed. As with all amateur (in both senses) movements, enthusiasm has at times exceeded critical judgement and the fear of change has been self-defeating. The simple paradox is that from the Second World War while the academic study of Burns was in steep decline, the number of people attending Burns Suppers grew consistently. By a mutual recognition that the Burns Supper, like Burns’s poetry, is not in the ownership of one nationality, political party or gender, the Burns Supper remains the largest literary festival in the world.

In the realization that second language learners’ grammatical competence does not always guarantee their communicative language ability and that meta-knowledge of English information structure might play an important role in developing their communicative language ability, I carried out a project in which the learners in the study, who were considered to have adequate grammatical competence but unsatisfactory communicative language ability, were given explicit instructions enhancing their meta-knowledge of English information structure as an initial step towards the development of their reading and writing skills and ultimately their communicative language ability. The approach adopted in the study is action research aiming at improving the teaching of academic reading and writing skills to undergraduate students for their communicative development and at the same time contributing the clarity of theories of language transfer, and the role of cognitive approaches in communicative language teaching. Answers to the following major research questions were to be sought. First, what problems do L2 learners have in their reading and writing in relation to their not having a clear and systematic understanding of English information structure? Second, to what extent are their problems influenced by their L1 meta-knowledge of information structure, and L1 strategies? Third, can a cognitive meta-linguistic approach to teaching information structure improve L2 learners’ understanding of English academic texts and structuring of written communication through which they might improve their communicative language ability? My teaching method is both knowledge-oriented and skill-oriented with each lesson being divided into two phases: meta-knowledge introduction and the follow-up skill development. Four data collection methods were applied: questionnaire, interview, test, and classroom-based methods. The data analysis suggests that the learners in the study encountered the reading and writing problems investigated and that they showed development in their reading and writing skills during and after the teaching phase. My conclusion is that there is a causal relationship between a meta-linguistic approach to teaching information structure to L2 learners and their communicative ability development.

The issue of teaching and learning communication strategies has been controversial over the past few decades. Whereas some theoretical arguments reject the benefits of teaching of communication strategies, many practical and empirical studies make pedagogical recommendations and support the idea. Nevertheless, there appears to be no information on teaching communication strategies to Thai learners of English in Thailand. To address these issues, this thesis investigates the effects of teaching communication strategies to Thai learners of English in Thailand. It was designed as an interventionist study conducted with a group of students. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected in the current study. Sixty-two fourth year students majoring in Engineering at King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok participated in this study. All the students received a 12-week communication strategy-based instruction and 12 students were asked to complete four speaking tasks and retrospective protocols. Data were collected via (1) self-report strategy questionnaire, (2) attitudinal questionnaire (3) transcription data of four different speaking tasks, and (4) retrospective protocols. The results from the self-report strategy questionnaire and the speaking tasks showed that the explicit teaching of communication strategies raised students’ awareness of strategy use and promoted the greater use of taught communication strategies of the students. The students considered the taught strategies in communication strategy instruction useful, especially pause fillers and hesitation devices, approximation, self repair and circumlocution. With respect to the retrospective verbal reports, the findings showed that the students tended to be more aware of the taught communication strategies. They revealed their intention and reasons behind their use of some taught communication strategies in more detail while completing the postspeaking tasks. Finally, the positive outcomes of the teaching of some specific communication strategies were supported by the findings of an attitudinal questionnaire on the strategy instruction. The findings suggest that the students found the communication strategy instruction useful for them. They also showed positive feelings and attitudes towards the communication strategy instruction.

In Taiwan, a reading comprehension component is included in the English test of the Senior High Academic Ability Examination (SHAAE) – a national examination which can be regarded as a university entrance examination for students in their final year of senior high. This reading subtest consists of a multiple-choice format. Studies on language assessment, L2 reading and L1-L2 reading have suggested that EFL students’ performance on multiple-choice reading comprehension tests is attributed to two major factors: English Language Knowledge and Strategy Use. This feature raises a number of issues. Does the multiple-choice reading comprehension subtest of the English component at the SHAAE measure what it is intended to assess? Do Taiwanese senior high school students’ English Language Knowledge and Strategy Use have an effect on their multiple-choice reading comprehension test performance? What are the relative contributions of students’ English Language Knowledge and Strategy Use to their reading comprehension test performance? Is there a language threshold for students’ deploying some strategies to contribute to their reading test performance? The current study sets out to address these issues. It investigates the relationship among Taiwanese senior high school students’ English language knowledge, reading and test-taking strategy use, and their multiple-choice reading comprehension test performance. The findings of the research are connected with: (a) the English language teaching approach for English language teachers in Taiwan; (b) the validity of the reading comprehension subtest of the English component at the SHAAE; and (c) the validity of salient models of language ability. A quantitative research approach is used that involves an ex post-facto correlational research design, utilizing survey methodology. An English Language Knowledge test, a Strategy Use questionnaire, and a multiple-choice reading comprehension test serve as instruments. 1064 EFL students in six senior high schools located in the south region of Taiwan participated in the study. Data was collected in the classroom during English class sessions. Participants took a reading test and completed a Strategy Use questionnaire. Three to seven days later, they sat an English Language Knowledge test. Exploratory factor analysis is conducted to extract components underlying the data collected from instruments. Structural Equation Modeling is applied to examine the relationship among students’ English Language Knowledge, Strategy Use and their reading test performance. The main finding of the study is that Taiwanese senior high school students are strategic readers/test-takers. Their English Language Knowledge and Strategy Use contribute to their reading test performance. However, compared with that of English Language Knowledge, the contribution of students’ Strategy Use to their reading test performance is smaller. In addition, a language threshold is present for students deploying strategies contributing to their reading test performance. In conclusion, the thesis addresses the need for implementing strategy instruction for students to improve their Strategy Use in a reading test and further to promote their reading test performance. The discussion also compares the outcome of the research with other approaches to Reading/Test-taking Strategy Use and current models of Strategic Competence.

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