Phrasal verbs are an intrinsic part of Late Modern English, and are found in both informal and colloquial language (check out, listen up) and more formal styles (a thesis might set out some problems and then sum up the main points). They are highly productive: 'up' can be added to almost any verb to signify goal or end-point (read up, finish up, eat up, meet up, fatten up); and once a phrasal verb has been coined, a conversion often follows (for example, the verb 'phone in' was first recorded in 1946, and the noun 'phone-in' in 1967; 'dumb down' was coined in 1933, and we read of 'dumbed-down' material in 1982). Perhaps because of their pervasiveness, phrasal verbs are frequently criticized (although occasionally praised) in Late Modern English texts about language. The purpose of this thesis is to examine such attitudes in three strands. Firstly, over one hundred language texts (grammars, dictionaries, and usage manuals, among others, from 1750 to 1970) were examined to discover how phrasal verbs were recognized and classified in Late Modern English. Secondly, these materials were analyzed in order to find out how attitudes towards phrasal verbs in English developed in relation to broader attitudes towards language in the Late Modern period. Thirdly, phrasal verb usage in A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, a corpus of British and American English from 1650 to 1990, was analyzed to determine how such attitudes affect usage. It will be shown that attitudes towards phrasal verbs reflect various strands of language ideology, including opinions about Latinate as opposed to native vocabulary; ideals relating to etymology, polysemy, and redundancy; reactions to neologisms; and attitudes towards language variety. Furthermore, it will be suggested that in the case of certain redundant combinations such as 'return back' and 'raise up', proscriptions of phrasal verbs did have an effect on their usage in the Late Modern period.

Initial investigations into English essays written by Syrian university students triangulated Syrian and British teachers’ evaluations of the essays and the lexico-grammatical features they identified as affecting the overall quality of writing, with text analyses of the sources, types and frequency of all grammatical errors. Following this, and a review of relevant literature, the thesis presents an in-depth study of relative clauses and conjunctive adjuncts as under-researched features in Arabic speaking university student writing that can enrich their writing syntactically and semantically. The relative clause (RC) analysis shows that the 'full' form RC occurred much more frequently than the 'reduced' form, and that confusion between these two forms was a prominent source of student error. 'Pronoun retention' errors indicating L1 interference were among the most frequent RC errors – as most studies of RC use by Arab learners find. Moreover, RC constructions with 'head noun' (or antecedent) in the non-subject position and 'gap' (or relativized NP/sentence) in the subject position were dominant, while other, and more complex, construction types were much less common. This supports the AHH and PDH hypotheses on the frequency/difficulty hierarchy of RC types. Conjunctive adjunct analysis reveals that 'additive' conjunctive adjuncts were more frequent, followed by 'causals'. Despite its informality, the resultive conjunctive adjunct 'so' was used most repeatedly, followed by 'also', 'but', and 'and'. Causal conjunctive adjuncts were most frequently misused, though in general conjunctive adjunct misuse is not a major weakness. Contrastive analysis between the L2 (Syrian) and an equivalent L1 (British) corpus of literature essays revealed no significant difference between the total frequencies of RCs, 'full' RCs and 'non-subject-subject' RCs. In contrast, the total frequencies of conjunctive adjuncts in the two corpora were significantly different, with the L2 corpus containing almost twice as many conjunctive adjuncts as the L1 corpus, particularly causals and additives, this latter category being most frequent in both corpora. The British students' employment of relative clause types and conjunctive expressions was generally more diverse than that of the Syrian students. Pedagogical implications conclude this thesis.

This thesis explores the interaction between context and attitude in the languagein- education experiences of multilingual refugees in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya, East Africa. The aim was to discover how they respond to policy and practice in language-in-education and the macro-societal influences that affect their attitudes. I wanted to find out the realities the refugee learners face as a corollary of the policy and practice, and their responses towards these realities. I used an approach based on Critical Ethnography to collect and analyse the data. This generated a diversity of data, allowing for triangulation. I drew on several theoretical frameworks to explore the diverse themes emerging from the data: Cummins' (2000) Transformative Pedagogy, Phillipson's (1992, 1999) Linguistic Imperialism, and Kachru's (1983, 1994) World Englishes. I found that the provision of language education for the refugees follows the mainstream Kenyan policy, a relic of colonialism, whereby English is the medium of instruction from Class Four onwards. Mother tongues or Swahili may, in theory, be used for the lower classes but the practice is often not so. Many refugees have a love-hate relationship with English. They find it hard to master, yet like it as a passport to resettlement, jobs and further education. A few appreciate Swahili but many ofthe Sudanese find it burdensome and unnecessary. Arabic, French and Mother tongues are both appreciated and disliked, but most find their usefulness reduced. The learners face harsh realities, as most not only have to learn the new languages but also have them used as media of instruction. They devise a range of strategies to respond to these realities, for instance, making their way into English Language support classes even if by trickery .and impersonation. This study seeks to contribute to the research literature by exploring how context and attitude affect each other in the education of learners in the temporary setting of a refugee camp.

There is a requirement, within Key Stages One to Four of the National Curriculum for English, that pupils should be taught various aspects of Knowledge About Language which draw on an explicit understanding of English grammar. Many English teachers find themselves ill-equipped to deal with grammar, not only because they have gaps in their own knowledge, but because they struggle to reconcile the teaching of grammar with the progressive philosophies which have underpinned English teaching in recent decades. A number of studies have explored the philosophies of English teaching. My aim was to examine the perceptions of trainee English teachers on grammar and its place in English teaching within the context of changing definitions of English, and specifically the National Curriculum version that they would be teaching to. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative data from questionnaire surveys and interviews enabled me to make a detailed description of trainees' prior experience of learning grammar and their feelings about teaching it. However, when I came to analyse their understandings of grammar and English, I came up against issues of interpretation and epistemology which caused me to re-think my analytical approach and my overall methodology. The problem was that questions on the meanings of grammar and English teaching had generated a complex, wide-ranging and often contradictory set of responses. I felt a conventional method of coding and analysis could not adequately reflect the intricate, shifting nature of trainee perceptions at this early stage of their apprenticeship. Allied to this were problems of epistemology: the dangers of treating data as fact at a time when the view of my respondents on teaching and on themselves as teachers were in a state of transition. My solution was to change my analytical method, to treat the data as discourse, to use discourse analysis to explore the multiple meanings of English and grammar for trainee teachers and to construct a model which could reflect the fluidity, the contradictions and the potentialities of this discourse. In this way I was able to provide evidence of a transformative process whereby trainee constructions of grammmar were broadening and becoming more compatible with their constructions of English and of themselves as English teachers, while at the same time demonstrating the contradictions and conflicts which continue to characterise subject English.

This thesis sets out to characterise English as a World Language, in contrast with English used in homogeneous, intranational settings. After a brief introduction, the relevant literature is reviewed in two chapters: firstly the concept of an international variety of English is challenged and, following this, there is consideration of current thinking under the headings of English as an International Language and English as Lingua Franca. This preliminary part of the thesis leads to some hypotheses concerning the way in which EWL might be characterised, with particular attention to attitudes among different sorts of speaker. Chapter Five introduces methodologies (1) for finding data-providing participants and (2) assessing their language-related attitudes relevant to the research questions. It continues by (3) examining ways of obtaining spoken data and (4) of transcribing and (5) analysing it. Chapter 6 presents the specific methodological choices for this thesis. The following four chapters provide results. Firstly, brief results are given of tests applied to ascertain participants' language-related attitudes. Following this, the results of analysing and explaining the spoken data itself are given. Chapter 8 closely compares one EWL conversation with one homogeneous one and draws tentative conclusions about what might be found in the remaining conversations: that EWL may be characterised by greater convergence among speakers, irrespective of whether or not they are native speakers. Chapter 9 examines the whole suite of conversations in this light and the previous results are generally confirmed: the speakers in homogeneous conversations tend to be as divergent as they are convergent, where in EWL conversations they try their best to maintain an atmosphere of comity. Chapter 10 completes the results section by comparing the performance of six speakers in particular, who each participate in an EWL conversation and in a homogeneous one. They are found to draw on convergence strategies for their EWL conversations while being more direct and divergent in their homogeneous ones. Chapter 11 attempts to summarise the preceding chapters and to draw some conclusions from the results.

This thesis consists of two mixed-methods studies: a validation study and an application study of Dörnyei's (2009a) L2 Motivational Self System with participants from China. The quantitative part of the validation study involved 1,154 Chinese middle school and university students from mainland China and the follow-up qualitative study consisted of ten Chinese university students at a British university from mainland China. Structural equation models and correlational analyses validated the L2 Motivational Self System in China. The issues of family, face, responsibility, and pressure clarified the motivational role of the Chinese family and explained the main relationships in the system. Differences in the motivational orientation of the two sub-groups demonstrated the ability of the system to represent different age groups. The application study involved an intervention programme that I developed at a British university in order to motivate my participants to put more time and effort into learning English by enhancing their vision of their Ideal L2 self. The programme contained 31 participants who were international students from China. The programme made most of the participants more motivated to learn English and all of them more confident in their English. There was a significant increase in the strength of the participants' Ideal L2 self as a result of the programme. The vision of the participants' Ideal L2 self and their goals for learning English became more clear and specific due to the programme. Motivation and confidence were found to mutually affect each other. Most of the participants' imagination improved as a result of the programme. They became more proficient in English, more aware of the importance of English in their lives, and their attitudes toward learning English became more positive due to the programme.

This study focuses on limited English students’ cognitive engagement generated through learning interactions with others and tasks under a content-driven and discovery-oriented CLIL learning arrangement in a primary school setting. The main aims are: to explore students’ capability to access and inhabit learning spaces within the L2 mediated discourse; to investigate the potential the CLIL learning experience has to sustain dialogic learning and thinking of a higher order; and finally, to make a contribution to the debate over the potential of the CLIL learning experience to promote deep learning and foster life-long learning competencies. At the heart of its theoretical underpinning lies the idea that cognition develops through the merging of the social with the individual which points towards the need to corroborate a socio-cognitive theoretical framework. Thus, the investigation is conceptualised within the ‘inter-mental development zone’ (Mercer and Littleton, 2007), under the auspices of dialogic learning (Wells, 2001b), and in cognisance of the individual’s active construction of knowledge (Bruner, 1985; van Dijk’s, 2006a). This theoretical line originates in the, now, classic theoretical constructs of Zone of Proximal Development and the More Knowledgeable Other from Vygotsky (1978), and the notion of scaffolding from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976). With regard to the methodological design, this explorative study falls under the qualitative paradigm within the boundaries of a case study, and corroborates close observations of the learning behaviours with introspective methods. A multilayered analysis is employed which allows elements from various contextual layers and dimensions to enrich the analytical insight. In addition, a fine grained-analysis is pursued regarding the dynamics as well as the substance of the learning events, which conveys a systematic and holistic investigation of the learning phenomenon. The findings of this study suggest that the CLIL approach be regarded as a learning interaction of three foci whereby alongside content-grounded and language-oriented strands run equally well-represented management-of-the-learning strands. Further, it is proposed that a reasonable level of ambiguity stemming from presenting content in the medium of a foreign language and from exposing students to new intriguing facts, prompts cognitive conflict thus giving rise to explorative conversational digressions which bring added cognitive value to the peer-sustained learning interaction. Moreover, this investigation also highlights the complementarity between conversational and instructional units on three levels of cognitive engagement (propositional, linguistic and managerial). Finally, an ability to activate and manipulate different manifestations of knowledge is documented. If this ability would be nurtured long-term, then a disposition for inquiry and criticality as well as an enhanced metacognitive awareness can develop which may translate into skills transferable across the curriculum. Overall, the study recommends the CLIL approach as a rich cognitive medium for learning, and an asset for promoting quality learning with the specification that its implementation needs careful context-bound consideration.

This research is carried out to explore teachers’ perspectives upon their teaching practices with respect to the in-service training program, C.O.T.E. they had been through. Teaching and in-service training have always been my interest area. Besides, after having informal conversations with the administrators from the Ministry of Education and owing to my observations, in North Cyprus the current education system needs to reformed considering main themes such as curriculum, in-service, pre-service training, material and curriculum design, lifelong learning, duration of school hours, financial issues and so forth. In this qualitative research, two major research questions guided this study. As a researcher the constructivist philosophical stance has been employed due to the fact that the purpose is to investigate teachers’ perspectives and in order to achieve this teachers themselves constructed their own perspectives on their teaching practices. Questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, video recording methods were used to gather the data. Questionnaire is used at the beginning of this research to grasp the general picture and at the same time to determine the number of participants. Then, semi structured interviews as pre and post were used to grasp a deeper understanding of teachers’ perspectives and video recordings were used to reflect teachers’ perspectives on their actual teaching practices. I finalized the research study by analysing and triangulating the participants’responses in relation to two major points as follows: o The effectiveness of the programme on teachers’ practice as evidenced through video recordings and discussions of their teaching. o Teachers’ perceptions of C.O.T.E with respect to the effectiveness of the training programme in course design, materials and practical experiences. I ended the research with the voice of the participants by underlying the significance and effectiveness of in-service training programs in general. The limitations of this study with the recommendations for further research are suggested at the end.

In this thesis the concept of Interactive Approach (IA) to the teaching and learning of imaginative texts and language is addressed in the English as a Second Language (ESL) context. As the title suggests the focus of the study was the Integrated English Curriculum (IEC) in Kenya. Although this curriculum was introduced twenty years ago, little has been done to bring about the envisaged integration between the English language and literature at the classroom level. The first chapter describes the background to and the rationale for the study. The second chapter addresses the research setting and explains the current English curriculum in Kenyan secondary schools. The related literature is reviewed in chapter 3 with a special focus on the pedagogical relationship between language and literature and the case for or against integrating the two components. In chapter 4, the methods used during data collection and analysis are presented. The findings of the study as described in chapter 5 affirm that there is the continued use of Traditional Approach (TA) to teaching imaginative texts despite the IEC being in place. This was found to be attributable to the lack of relevant training and the overwhelming focus on examinations by the education system as results from teachers show. The use of the proposed Reader - Text Interactive Approach (RTIA) was positively received by learners as shown by their responses to the interactive exercises. On the basis of these findings, the thesis concludes that there is an urgent need for educators to re-think the way teachers of English are trained in the country and redesign the IEC curriculum materials so that these take into account the integrated curriculum. It is further recommended that RTIA be adopted because the approach was found to have the potential of ensuring that the IEC becomes a reality at the classroom level in Kenya secondary schools.

This thesis explores the implications of high frequency collocation for adult second language learners. It addresses three main questions. First, it asks to what extent high frequency of occurrence in a corpus indicates that collocations are independently represented in the minds of native speakers. A word association study indicates that high frequency of occurrence is a fairly reliable predictor of mental representation, though this methodology does not allow us to determine the precise strength of the relationship. A series of lexical decision studies also show a relationship between frequency and representation, but effects are limited to those collocations which are sufficiently salient to also register as associates. This suggests that psycholinguistic 'priming' models may not be the best way of understanding collocation. Second, the thesis examines the idea that adult second language learners usually fail to retain the collocations to which they are exposed. This is tested through a lab-based training study and a learner-corpus study. Results suggest that adult learners are capable of learning collocations from input, but that 1) the relatively low levels of input to which most learners are exposed mean that they nevertheless tend not to attain native-like profiles of collocation use, and 2) input which provides repeated exposure to collocations can dramatically improve learning. Third, the thesis asks whether a useful pedagogical listing of frequent 'academic collocations' can be compiled. Results suggest that an academic collocation list is viable, but that important caveats need to be made concerning the nature of the collocations included and the range of disciplines for which such a listing will be useful. Moreover, listings of two-word collocations should be seen only as a starting point for more comprehensive phraseological listings. Suggestions will be made for ways in which we might go beyond such two-word listings.