This thesis focuses on epistolary theory in early modern England. There are a few studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean letter-writing manuals to date, though scholars typically use chronological analyses of instructional texts printed between 1568-1640. However, the methodology of this dissertation departs considerably from earlier studies. Rather than study many texts chronologically, I focus on one: Angel Day’s The English Secretary. Day’s manual, printed nine times in fifty years, was the most popular of its time. I use these editions– many of them heavily revised – to trace developments of epistolary theory. This approach necessitates a two-part methodology: bibliographical analysis and textual criticism. Before examining The English Secretary as a letter-writing text, I take up the manual, and its nine editions, using principles of bibliography to locate the revisions that Day made to his manual. Once I locate his revisions, I use textual analysis to determine their signification. In so doing, I reappraise the critical consensus about Day’s manual. It reveals that Day, typically cast as a proto-epistolary novelist or pre-Richardson Richardson, did not write as a literary author. Rather, he wrote in turns as a government servant and professional – the approved roles of a writer in Elizabethan literary culture. This newly informs the purpose of Day’s manual, as well as epistolary theory: letter-writing instruction at this time did not preview the emergence of the epistolary novel but maintained a civic, professional, and social function in early modern England.

This study contributes to the understanding of how language learners make use of a second language, specifically how French English learners make use of the English modals may and can. The study is based on the assumptions that (i) acquiring a new language is a cognitively demanding task which requires the acquirer to identify [a] large amount of co-occurrence data, that (ii) those data are probabilistic in nature rather than absolute, and (iii) that semantic differences are particularly hard to discern and learn as they are not oxplicably noticeable. This study applies Divjak and Grie's (2008) behavioural Profile approach to semantic analysis to a corpus of native and learner English and native French in order to offer a fine-grained quantitative investigation of the co-occurrence patterns of may and can in both English varieties. It shows not only that may and can can be characterised and differentiated on the basis of their co-occurrence patterns, but also that such co-occurrence patterns vary systematically in native English and French-English interlanguage. This finding is supported by monofactorial and multifactorial statistical results indicating that (i) the meanings and the functions of may and can in both English varieties are correlated with the distributions of formal elements within their contexts of occurrence and (ii) that the uses of may and can activate different linguistic levels simultaneously. Generally, these results suggest that the grammatical context of the forms' occurrences presents processing constraints that influence and ultimately characterise learners' choices of may and can. More specifically, the study identifies six grammatical components that systematically trigger the use of may and can in a non-native fashion. Overall, the study shows that (i) it is possible to predict learner language on the basis of corpus-based and psychologically-informed hypotheses on the processing and the acquisition of lexical items of second language learners.

This thesis examines the work of the nineteenth century journalist George Augustus Sala. Previous studies of Sala have focused upon the biographical aspects of his life at the expense of critical analysis of the prolific contributions he made to newspapers and periodicals. This thesis will readdress this imbalance by a close reading of Sala's visual and textual output together with an examination of the contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. In particular it will suggest that Sala's journalistic style was a product of the very different mediums he was working in, and how this personal style along with his innovations in form would influence the New Journalism at the end of the century. For so long a misunderstood and neglected figure, this thesis will endeavour to reposition Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century media culture rather than at its margins. My research links Sala's role as an engraver, illustrator, and scene-painter to his career as an essayist for Dickens's Household Words. It will demonstrate how this in turn influenced his experiments with the form of the novel which would impact on his work as the pre-eminent Special Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. In an age of rapid press and cultural transformation my research will highlight Sala's engagement with theories of urban modernity and commodity culture; gambling, finance capitalism and the uncertainty of modern life; the culture of literary bohemia and the plight of the poor and the oppressed; and the role of the journalist. I will pursue Sala's commitment to sensationalism and realism in his novels, and his fluctuating opinions on race, slavery and imperialism in his travel writing. This thesis will also shed light on Sala's relationship with some of the most important journalists, authors, and artists of the nineteenth century – Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Mary Braddon, WP Frith, Henry Vizetelly, Frederick Greenwood and W.T. Stead. Necessarily interdisciplinary in focus, my research draws on critical work by cultural historians and literary theorists like Tim Barringer, P.D. Edwards, Mary Gluck, Lynda Nead, Deborah Nord, Matthew Rubery, Richard Sennett, Ralph Straus, Catherine Waters and Ruth Yeazell, among others. By examining contemporary periodicals, newspapers and letters this thesis will contribute to the burgeoning field of nineteenth-century print culture, while adding to the knowledge and understanding of the man many considered to be the 'beau-ideal' of a journalist.

Dictionaries can be effective learning tools, capable of promoting learning autonomy to fill the gap left by an inefficient education for instance. The functional quality of these works is, however, tied to a good understanding of the profile of their intended users. In the field of lexicography, this understanding can be achieved by means of user-studies. Currently, most EFL dictionaries target a very generic profile - English learners - and neglect the fact that learners from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds may have different needs and preferences. This thesis presents and discusses the results of a lexicographic user-study conducted in Brazil with 61 English learners. The objective of this study was to investigate the profile of Brazilian learners of English as a target-group for EFL dictionaries. The study combined two methods of investigating dictionary use: written protocol and questionnaire. Through the written protocol, data about participants’ look-up strategies and samples of their performance in both receptive and productive EFL tasks were collected. The questionnaire gathered information about participants’ socio-cultural background and their consultation preferences. All data were analysed as follows: principles of Error Analysis were used to build a taxonomy capable of classifying participants’ errors resulting from reference source consultation (meaning, grammar, spelling or usage). The taxonomy was built based on the premise that it can be a valuable way of identifying the weakness of EFL learners in order to develop a dictionary to address their needs. With the results of this classification, it was possible to identify participants’ most frequent difficulties when performing EFL tasks. Once participants’ errors were located and classified, information about their look-up strategies was used to retrace the consulted reference source in order to find clues to explain why the consultation resulted in error. Finally, participants’ self-reported behaviour in the questionnaire was compared to their actual behaviour in the experiment. The results of this user-study suggest that both linguistic and socio-cultural background have an impact on learners’ expectations about dictionaries, their preferences, and the difficulties they experience while trying to access relevant linguistic information. The outcomes of this study shed light on the average profile of the Brazilian learner of English and it would be useful for other investigations towards the development of a lexicographic reference source to address the specific needs of this target group.

This thesis critically analysed the influence of the Libyan public examination on English Language Teaching (ELT) and on learning strategies and practice in secondary school classrooms. It investigated the washback of the Secondary Education Certificate Examination (SECE) on ELT teachers and explored practitioners’ perceptions and practices. It also examined washback on students’ perception, motivation, learning strategies and outcomes. Weir’s socio-cognitive framework for test validity was chosen as a conceptual framework for its capability of conceptualising appropriate evidence on how testing constructs (policy & design) are operationalised and interpreted (use) in practice. This thesis describes an interpretative qualitative case study research conducted in the south west of Libya. Data were generated through interviews, classroom observation and document analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two ELT teachers and inspectors, a school headteacher and a representative of the examination office. Group interviews were also conducted with a number of the final year secondary school students within the research context. All the research data were analysed using a thematic data analysis. The findings reveal that the lack of alignment between the focus of the English SECE and the objectives of the curriculum had a significant adverse effect on the Libyan ELT teachers, inspectors and students’ perceptions about the aim and the value of ELT in the school education and their role within the policy as well as on Libyan school students’ motivation. The study participants held the perception that developing language skills is not the aim of teaching English in Libyan secondary school since these skills have never been assessed in public examinations despite their integration in the curriculum. The Libyan ELT teachers and inspectors prioritised the aim of completing the curriculum through the use of traditional approaches of teacher-centred and Grammar Translation Method(GTM) and teaching to the test rather than meeting the pedagogical objectives of ELT or implementing the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) proposed in the school curriculum. The Libyan on-going conflict, the public examination policy, and teachers’lack of assessment literacy were also significant on classroom testing. Students were largely passive in English classrooms as teaching focused on the SECE. Accordingly, students utilised different learning strategies to cope with the teaching such as prioritising the translation of textbook texts, relying on rote-learning, engaging in test-preparation activities and developing test-taking strategies. Evidence accumulated through this study clearly indicates that Libyan students’ experience of the public examination had a significant effect on their attitudes, perceptions and choice of learning strategies. This finding represented an important implication for developing the socio-cognitive framework for test validity. The public examination strategies improved the Libyan secondary school students’ examination performance in the SECE but not their English learning outcomes. The examination content and format as well as a social acceptance of cheating all have a significant effect on students’ performance in the SECE and threaten its score validity.

The thesis argues that by mapping three selected discursive practices – Explanations, Accounts, and Formulations – and by interpreting their respective roles and interrelations, it is possible to assess how, through talk, decisions are developed and implemented in meetings. Drawing on a longitudinal, year-long observation of business meetings undertaken by managerial teams in a large UK Chamber of Commerce and on analyses of authentic audio data, the thesis investigates how decision making is enacted in meetings discourse in the context of organisational change. A structured, Conversation-analytical approach is employed to examine the transcribed data and develops a macro-/micro- matrix within which to understand the behaviour and influences of the practices on decision-making. The research specifically expands the role of Explanations and furthers the established communicative properties of Accounts and Formulations proposed in the ground-breaking work of Scott and Lyman (1968) and Heritage and Watson (1979), respectively. Most importantly, the analysis identifies the significance of long turns in the meetings data, and documents the link between decision-making and the recurrence and clustering of the three practices in or around these.

The translation unit has been regarded as an elusive notion in linguistics. The literature shows that there seems to be little agreement regarding, in particular, their identification and size. This study attempts to rethink these two central issues of translation units with the help of a parallel corpus: the ARC (the Alignment of Reuters Corpora), an English-Japanese newswire corpus. The main achievements of this study are: the identification of five variables associated with translation unit size; the establishment of an unbiased, reproducible identification method; and, the demonstration that translation pairs (i.e. translation units and their equivalents) are ideal for contrastive analysis. The identification method, ‘the one-equivalent principle’, established in this thesis is justified linguistically by a thorough, systematic review of the relevant literature, and empirically using nine case studies. The target words of the case studies were the most frequent content words in the ARC: market; government; year; economic; new; foreign; said; told; and, expected. The examination of translation unit size, as well as non-translation units and translation pairs, shows that parallel corpora, and the one-equivalent principle, are powerful tools for understanding the nature of translation units.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the use of “wh” sentences by language learners, in language textbooks and in authentic written discourse. It focuses on the polysemeous nature of “wh” words, which can be usedas interrogatives, declaratives and to introduce subordinate clauses. The analysis of “wh” sentences in EFL textbooks showed that there are more prototypical examples at low proficiency levels. When teaching the interrogative, textbooks focus almost exclusively on grammatical words, particularly at the beginners’ level. The analysis of “wh” sentences elicited from Chinese speaking learners of English and Expert users of English suggested that the prototypical structure is very strong in both sets of data, although native speakers tend to use more prefabricated chunks of language. The analysis of “wh” sentences from native speakers and non-native speakers’ written corpora suggested that subordinate clauses are strongly present in both corpora, except for the word “why” in non-native speakers’ data. The use of different words occurring immediately after “wh” words in the two corpora can be explained by (1) the relatively small vocabulary size of the L2 speakers; (2) non-native speakers’ lack of awareness of restricted collocations; (3) L1 transfer; (4) over/under-generalization of rules and (5) textbooks.

This thesis investigates the mechanisms that underlie the interaction of gesture and speech during the production and comprehension of language on a temporal and semantic level. The results from the two gesture-speech production experiments provide unambiguous evidence that gestural content is shaped online by the ways in which speakers package information into planning units in speech rather than being influenced by how events are lexicalised. In terms of gesture-speech synchronisation, a meta-analysis of these experiments showed that lexical items which are semantically related to the gesture's content (i.e., semantic affiliates) compete for synchronisation when these affiliates are separated within a sentence. This competition leads to large proportions of gestures not synchronising with any semantic affiliate. These findings demonstrate that gesture onset can be attracted by lexical items that do not co-occur with the gesture. The thesis then tested how listeners process gestures when synchrony is lost and whether preceding discourse related to a gesture's meaning impacts gesture interpretation and processing. Behavioural and ERP results show that gesture interpretation and processing is discourse dependent. Moreover, the ERP experiment demonstrates that when synchronisation between gesture and semantic affiliate is not present the underlying integration processes are different from synchronous gesture-speech combinations.

This multidimensional study comprehensively explores the English language textbook situation in Pakistan in five stages utilizing mixed methods approach. Two preliminary stages were small scale – a survey of the English language requirements and interviews of the officials involved in sanctioning and publishing textbooks. The main stages were the critical examination of the English curricula and syllabi, the survey of the views of the textbook users, and the detailed coursebook evaluation. The evaluation criteria checklists and questionnaires employed during these stages were mainly based on the materials development, ‘needs analysis’ and curriculum design literature. The research highlighted shortcomings in the overall educational arena and these weaknesses are assumed to be indirectly responsible for the poor standard of English prevailing in the country. The curriculum and textbook policies were found to be inadequate. Generally the teachers/administrators lacked critical, in-depth and practical understanding of language learning objectives, teaching techniques, syllabus design, and materials. By and large, the coursebooks overwhelmingly relied on controlled and artificial activities to teach English. In conclusion, suggested improvements in the curriculum development process, teachers and textbook writers training programmes and, importantly, the prescribed coursebooks can in the long run aid in facilitating English language acquisition in the Pakistani learners.