The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed account, within a 'systemic' framework of those properties of English sentences containing modal verbs, which will allow us to make predictions about the potential directiveness of some such sentences but not others, about ambiguit…
This thesis positions itself between two general approaches to Shelley, that of appreciating his poetics, on the one hand, and that of valuing his philosophical vision, on the other. Duffy has noted that ""Shelley's epistemological and political maturity is no longer in any seri…
This research investigated students' use and perception of value of the mobile smartphone application Memrise as a support to their vocabulary learning of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL). This study followed a mixed method sequential explanatory approach in which data we…
This is a practitioner-research study of the development of criticality in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts, via pedagogy for autonomy, exploratory practice (EP), and arts-enriched research methods. The study begins with an exploration of criticality with respect to …
There has been some sociological interest in MG Rover’s decline and widespread deindustrialisation in Birmingham. However, little research has considered the proximity of Rover’s closure in 2005 to another seminal event for the city – the opening of the Bullring shopping centre …
This thesis argues that nineteenth-century shifts in hermeneutics enabled women to re-vision Victorian conceptions of womanhood by reinterpreting biblical narratives within fictional texts. Due to these shifts, the meaning of biblical symbols was increasingly tied to the persona…
This study is concerned with the linguistic analysis of a cognitive training programme for offenders which was run at Prison X in 1996. Several Cognitive Skills classes run by prison officers and attended by groups of five to eight prisoners were videotaped and analysed to inves…
1. The Hon. Robert Curzon junior is a figure of significance for three reasons that have long been a matter of record. Firstly, be was the only person ever to investigate the contents of the monastic libraries of the Middle East and Meteora, others both before and after his time…
The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of a Data Driven Learning (DDL) approach on Iranian EFL learners' writing skills development and their attitudes towards the approach. A pre-test post-test control group design supplemented by a set of interviews and a question…
The topic of my three-part thesis is pragmatic information in EFL dictionaries. The thesis started with literature review and theoretical explorations of pragmatic information for EFL dictionaries (Module 1). Based on the findings from this first Module, I approached pragmatics …
This research focuses on the contrastive analysis of authentic persuasive business correspondence written in English by Thai speakers and native English speakers in the Thai business context. Three types of persuasive correspondence - sales promotion, request, and invitation - w…
This thesis centres on how recipes and songs can generate an identity for a community in relocation. I focus upon the South Asian community in Lockwood, West Yorkshire, and show how cultural practices have migrated and relocated from the homeland to the diaspora. I read these or…
This thesis, ‘Broadcasting Modernity’ is an account of sound technology, namely wireless, as a feature of early twentieth century literature. If modernism is a historical-specific movement, and language a repository of time, then the advent of radio broadcasting cannot be ignore…
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…
Hospitals and other health institutions around the world have begun to tie staff promotion and careers to publication; accordingly, an increasing number of medical journal articles are being written by non-native English speakers and novice writers. This work aims to analyse med…
English speaking is arguably the most problematic aspect for adult learners in Taiwanese EFL environments. The gap between the curricular objectives and the results of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) indicates that younger generations outrun college students in learn…
The status of the cross-linguistic dimension of second language learning, and hence of L2 pedagogy, appears to have been systematically underplayed in epicentric, i.e. flowing from centre to periphery, theories of second language acquisition (SLA). Indeed, following the advent o…
This biography tells the life story of a secondary school English coursebook in Kenya following market liberalization (1998) and curriculum review (2002). In ELT, Gray (2007, 2010) first applied the ‘circuit of culture’ model to global English coursebooks; in contrast, I examine…
This is an exploratory mixed methods case study which investigates a number of critical issues regarding the teaching and learning of an English Language and Literature Department (henceforth the ELLD) in a Chinese university, including curriculum development, content-based inst…