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The present investigation analyzes critically the discursive and generic make-up, the conceptual base and educational goals of a new interdisciplinary academic field of enquiry called Intercultural Business Communication as it is pursued in the context of the Germany higher education system. Its purpose is twofold: Firstly, it attempts to bring to light and debate the actual validity claims made by these authors in respect to socio-economic changes and the educational promise of intercultural understanding through intercultural training. Secondly, it shows how aspects of context (e.g. interdisciplinary relations, disciplinary intricacies, hegemonic discourses, changes in the higher educational system and its relation to other social spheres) can impact upon the discourse and genre of social science in general and this particular field in particular. By drawing upon Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical stance and a methodological path, a corpus of 24 academic articles published in this area is analyzed in relation to the recontextualization of socio-economic changes (presences and absences of social actors, processes and evaluation), the legitimation of educational goals through reference to these changes, the conceptualization of key terms (like culture, the other etc.), the implications of these theoretical decisions for the possibility of increased, mutual understanding and the form of academic writing (argumentation, debate, genre change). While the thesis aims to identify specific discursive and generic patterns, open them to contestation, and to explain their presence in these texts, it is also strongly normative and discusses questions related to the changing understanding of the nature, form and function of academic knowledge production in society.

The main aim of this study was to understand how (English) language teachers operate in resource-poor secondary state school English language teaching (ELT) contexts. To achieve this aim, Archer's (1995, 1996, 1998a) critical realist theory: structural conditioning, reflexivity (concerns, values and beliefs), and structural elaboration/social change was adopted for the case analysis and interpretation of the data of the four English language teachers. Employing a qualitative case-study approach, the data was obtained through semistructured interviews, classroom observations and field notes from (initially) eight participant teachers. Although looking through the data from all eight participant-teachers helped a great deal in understanding the phenomenon under consideration, the final report of this study only presents data from four of these participants for the reasons mentioned in the relevant chapters. The findings revealed that the institutional structures (teaching context), where the participant-teachers' work, conditioned the teacher' work by constituting an environment of contemporary action and creating certain modes of action when the teachers' attempted to respond to them in the light of their pedagogical beliefs, values and concerns. During this process, the participant teachers underwent internal conversations/reflexive deliberations, where they weighed different options available to them in the given circumstances. Although, the participant-teachers differed from each other in their reflexive deliberation, such deliberations served as a mediator between the given material structures and the teachers' actual behaviour (pedagogical responses). On account of operating in similar teaching contexts (institutional structures), and having strong social (collegial) support, the participant-teachers shared many similarities in their response to these structures. Nevertheless, some differing responses are also apparent from the research. The findings also revealed that the structural conditioning occurred in four ways: constraining influences, enabling influences, neither constraining nor enabling and/or both constraining and enabling factors or influences. The constraining factors which appeared were broadly: large classes and associated factors, students and teacher's related factors, exam paper expectations, classroom facilities, in-service and specialized professional development courses. The social factors mainly included networking with colleagues/teachers forming collegial relationships in their respective schools, while the cultural factors mainly included the teachers' own positive and negative educational experiences (generally referred to as 'apprenticeship of observation'), general preservice courses, institutional guidelines/textbooks as well as teachers' experiences of teaching. All these influences resulted in the teachers' behavior (or agency) as seemingly compliant but at the same time showing creativity and problem solving, hence demonstrating agentic tendencies of transformation, though not yet fully matured. Although not within the scope of this study to further explore and possibly a next step, such a tendency to innovative/creative moves might be representative of that space where prior structures are gradually transformed and new ones slowly elaborated, that is phase T2 and T3 in Archer's morphogenetic model (Archer, 1995). Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are addressed in the light of the findings.

The issue of teaching language learning strategies to EFL/ESL learners has been controversial over the past few decades. Whereas empirical studies make pedagogical recommendations and support the idea of directly training students in the use of strategies, overall findings reveal only partial success after strategy teaching or training. Besides, mainstream language learning strategies and strategy instruction research has been underpinned by cognitive theory, leaving aside the social and cultural aspects of learning. In a turn to sociocultural theory, it has been argued that strategies are related to both individual cognitive processes and the mediation of the practices in which learning takes place (Donato & McCormick, 1994; Gao, 2006; Parks & Raymond, 2004). Likewise, learners' language goals seem to have a significant role in how strategic learning progressively develops (Gillette, 1994; Da Silva, 2008).Grounded on sociocultural theory, this study investigates how strategic learning develops without direct teaching of strategies, but from the mediation of learners' goals and their reflection on classroom activity. In seeking for methodological appropriateness, the present study has combined qualitative research procedures with alternative methods from those utilized intervention studies. This was achieved by the implementation of a goal-oriented portfolio project and a learning journal into a language classroom of a TEFL program at a public university in Mexico. Portfolios and learning journals had a twofold purpose: mediate students' learning and collect data. Eighteen undergraduate students learning English as a foreign language participated in the study. Data gathered from students' written reflections over a fourteen-week period provided with evidence on how mediated and goal-oriented activity facilitates students' strategic learning. Findings suggest that learners can take a more strategic approach to language learning if classroom practices are intentionally changed to this purpose. Moreover, they indicate that the notion of development is essential to the understanding of how learners use strategies. The study itself aims to help language teachers identify application for their own classrooms and to inform future research works framed within the framework of sociocultural theory.

This thesis explores the impact of inclusive technology (an E-book read by vision-impaired adult learners with their accessible software and hardware of choice) on the self-efficacy beliefs of college-level, vision-impaired (VI) EFL students at a Saudi Arabian university, as well as on their agency and performance. This study is predominantly qualitative to best elaborate the impact for each research subject and seeks to investigate the perspectives and attitudes of VI students at the Saudi Arabian university regarding learning English in general, and about the use of accessible technology as a tool for learning. The methods used in the current study are pre- and post-intervention semi-structured interviews, a focus group discussion at three months post-intervention, and pre- and post-intervention self-efficacy beliefs questionnaires. The analysis of quantitative data was facilitated by statistical tools such as those found in Microsoft Excel. Meanwhile, data analysis for the qualitative component was in the form of content analysis, achieved by extracting relevant themes from the interviews and the focus group discussion. Qualitative participant data in this study reveal that there are knowledge gaps relating to how best to support vision-impaired learners of English at university in Saudi Arabia, and that a) a lack of proper support and b) the provision of improved support bears a strong relationship to vision impaired English learners’ self-efficacy beliefs. Implications of the research findings are outlined and a number of recommendations are provided for further research and pedagogical adaptations that could and should be introduced to improve the status of vision-impaired adult learners in the Saudi context. In particular, recommendations are made that form the basis of a new pedagogical framework for best practice, training, and government policy.

While it is argued that the acceptance of the metatheory of critical realism opens up the potential to address many of the problematic issues of morality (Bhaskar 1986; Collier 1994), the development of, what appear to be, four competing critical realist moral theories creates issues for this approach. These theories are Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realist Ethics (1993), Collier’s theory of worth (1999), Sayer’s Lay Morality (2004, 2011) and Elder-Vass’s Realist Critique (2010). In addition to these theories of what morality is, all of these writers, and Price (2017), also provide separate answers to the question of how you can discover more about morality. While there are extensive discussions of the theories of Bhaskar and Elder-Vass there is, to date, no comparative study that explores all of these approaches to morality with respect to the underlying metatheory and to each other. In this thesis, I explore these theories through considering the questions of: the legitimacy and universal applicability of any moral argument; morality as an aspect of human nature and society; and how an enquiry into morality should progress. This approach enables Bhaskar, Elder–Vass, Collier, and Sayer to be understood as having applied the metatheory to different questions in morality and therefore provides an understanding of their similarities and points of agreement. From this research a comprehensive realist theoretical understanding of morality, which is a synthesis of the existing approaches, is produced; which I argue provides an overall theoretical framework which both facilitates and can be tested for its explanatory power through subsequent practical research.

The interrelationship between social structure and agency is relatively unexplored in second language acquisition research, although it has been extensively studied in the field of social science. SLL has focused on agency from a postructuralist and sociocultural perspective linked to other constructs such as identity and power relations within different discourses. Agency is recognised as being creative and responsive to the sociocultural context, but also difficult to define. As a result, there has been a call for interdisciplinarity for a better understanding in SLA research (Sealey and Carter, 2004, Vitanova 2010, Norton, 2013, Block, 2013; Block, 2015). Following such a call, this study attempts to link language learners’ accounts to various layers of context and social structure as proposed by Block’s (2015) model of structure and agency. It explores and seeks to explain how structures can work as enablements or constraints in second language learning in a transnational touristic destination. Significantly influenced by Daniel Block's writings, the psychological angle is included. This research is underpinned by Roy Bhaskar’s realist philosophy of social science and uses Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) and Margaret Archer’s (1995, 2000, and 2007) key concepts to understand better what makes students shape or resist their access to EFL. These theories are deemed suitable for a study which seeks to understand how students take decisions regarding language learning. The research participants were 11 students in the undergraduate programme of Sustainable Tourism and International Business at a government university in the city of Cancun. Data sources included language learning biographies, comments, the researcher field notes and knowledge of the context. With regard to social structure, it was found that the relevance of English in Cancun contributes to students’ desire to learn it. They cannot however, easily practice the language in the city until they insert themselves in the job market. Parents are seen to invest in their children’s English language learning regardless of their socio-economic status given that Mexican government education is considered deficient. Students negotiate their participation in different contexts in the form of social relations, either face to face or through physical objects and digital devices, thus exercising their agency. The study also found that students deal with economic and family situations that constrain their choices. The findings suggest that students’ agency is the combination of past experiences, perceived linguistic competence, and the attributed importance of English to their present and future lives, which involves interests, aspirations and expectations that relate to their identity, who they are and who they want to become.

The present study investigates the collaborative processes whereby learners of English use WhatsApp as a platform on smart phones to acquire new vocabulary. A review of the literature on mobile learning shows that a number of studies (Lu, 2008; Kennedy and Levy, 2008) conclude that vocabulary acquisition can be improved in this way yet fail to show what cognitive and social processes students employ to learn vocabulary and how learning might take place. In an attempt to fill this research gap, this study focusses on a group of 33 Saudi students from the English language department at a university in Saudi Arabia, who took part in an online class using WhatsApp as a tool to learn and use target vocabulary and to facilitate spontaneous interaction. It seeks to understand how teacher-student and student-student 'chats' lead to learning by analyzing the richness of their conversation in order to understand the dynamic of multiple variables to achieve learning. The students received bite-sized vocabulary learning messages and took part in two WhatsApp discussion groups over a period of 5 weeks, in addition to their regular language classes. It also investigates the students' acceptance of learning with the use of mobile phones and their readiness to implement it. The research uses a mixed methods approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the participants' vocabulary gain and of their engagement in the process. The WhatsApp chat conversations were analysed in order to understand how learners use this new medium to learn. Findings showed that all students acquired vocabulary but at varying rates. Differences in vocabulary gain are attributed to many factors including variation in frequency and quality of contributions to the WhatsApp discussions, motivation to learn English, acceptance of mobile phones (WhatsApp) as a learning tool, and to individual self-regulation and individual differences.

This thesis grew out of a sense that there is a timely need to investigate the representational dimension of language and ways in which ideologies are discursively constructed around a much-debated social group that captured global public concern in recent years. Through a specifically tailored discourse-analytical approach, the research combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL) to analyse a 1,627,000-word corpus of 787 political speeches delivered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 2013-2016. The value of conducting this investigation stems from the observation that divisive rhetoric has become increasingly acceptable in political dialogue around Islam and Muslims following the rise of (a) ISIS and its likes which claim to represent the religion and (b) right-wing populism in Europe. Less academic attention is given to investigating and critiquing the representations of Islam and Muslims in discourses delivered by key political leaders at global leading institutions like the United Nations, certainly not from a linguistic standpoint. It is in this particular context of knowledge gap that this study wishes to contribute. With the help of CL, this predominantly qualitative investigation draws upon CDA as a theoretical stance and a methodological path to conduct in-depth analyses of the wider effects of bringing religion as an object of debate in international politics. The large data corpus allows me to explore the most frequently recurring representations which become naturalised and get disseminated through political discourse as a crucial vehicle of transmission. Some of the analytical methods applied in this study included Halliday’s SFL, the DHA associated with the Vienna school of CDA and van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic theories of legitimation. Analyses unveil that the representations of Islam and Muslims in the discourses of the UNGA are seen as connected to wider depictions including those appearing in media portrayals and other political discourses outside the UN. The studied political statements debated views about (a) the religion itself (b) the threat of extremism, and (c) the challenges of Islamophobia. The thesis concludes by considering the implications of the research findings then provides several recommendations to embrace discourses that promote co-existence and challenge ones that provide sustenance to the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and the politics of fear it promulgates.

The aim of this research is to explore the factors that affect listeners when they are introduced to the generic features of texts. In this intervention study, learners in a Mexican university are introduced to the linguistic features, generic structure and context of spoken narrative texts about a film, in the first and foreign language (L1) and (L2), in order to better understand the development of L2 listening skills. On the basis of participants’ stimulated recalls (SR) and semi-structured interviews, I analysed the listeners’ thought processes and listening strategies, after they are introduced to the generic features of narratives. While initially set up as experimental study with an experimental (EG) and a control group (CG), the qualitative data reveals that different listeners’ in both groups used different listening cognitive, metacognitive, affective and sociocultural strategies, during the intervention. The participants in this study are 34 undergraduates studying for an English language teaching degree. Seventeen students are enrolled in the fourth semester and take part in the CG and another seventeen in the EG. The CG attended a regular class, whereas the EG received instruction from a genre-based approach for listening purposes in a scaffolded way, going from guided deconstruction to independent reconstruction of spoken narratives. Participants analyse the texts’ social and textual elements including the context, language used, variations and organisation. The findings show that listening at a discourse level is multidimensional. Participants in the EG elaborate and incorporate different types of prior knowledge. While listening, they attempt to identify and contextualize social situations as well as structural elements based on knowledge gained through a genre-based approach. Findings unveil aspects affecting the outcomes of a genre based approach in listening and can help researchers appreciate the practicality of these findings for the understanding of listening from a genre-based perspective.

This research is designed as an ethnographic case study to examine Thai teacher's and students' responses to the representations of nature in Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) in the Environmental Literature and Criticism module taught at a public university in Thailand. The study is based on the application of three theoretical frameworks: Claire Kramsch's 'third place' (2011) which refers to a negotiation of meaning across different cultures, Karen Risager's 'transnational paradigm' (2007) that is teaching foreign culture with an emphasis on cultural complexity, and Michael Byram's 'intercultural citizenship' (2008) which refers to teaching foreign-language texts that respond to socio-political issues. Cultural and literary analysis is also adopted as part of the supportive framework for data analysis. A qualitative approach is used to interpret the data obtained from classroom observations, teacher and student interviews, documentary data and field notes. The participants, a teacher and three students, were observed for four months and interviewed at the end of the semester. The findings reveal that Refuge, Ceremony, The Hungry Tide and teaching approach concern the struggle of the marginalised: women, ethnic minorities and postcolonial countries. The teacher's presentation of the texts highlights the clashing views of nature held by different social groups and makes suggestions about how to reconcile these conflicts. Her explanation reflects an attempt to make the issues contained in the stories relevant to Thai students. The teacher compares similar ecological and socio-political problems in the texts and in Thailand. Her interpretation of the portrayals of nature reflects a circulation of values across different cultures in the texts and in the teaching context. The students' responses suggest that the teacher's explanation and the stories make them aware of the issues in the texts and in their own country. The students' interpretations are according to their individual interests and socio-cultural backgrounds.

This investigation joins the increasing body of research on initial teacher education arguing that preservice teacher (PST) learning and identity construction are intertwined and are crucial to professional development. Guided by Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop's (2004) theoretical framework for investigating teacher professional identities, the focus of this study is to examine from a socio-constructivist perspective 1) how experiences in the practicum influence early professional identity construction; 2) how personal factors influence early identity construction; and 3) how reflective practice in the practicum influences PST professional identity development. To this end, I ask preservice teacher participants to reflect upon the challenges which they face during the practicum component of their second language teacher education (SLTE) programme and how their experiences have shaped their notions of professional identity, while paying particular attention to agency within resource poor environments. Specifically, this study examines the various problems confronting PSTs which include the impact of social, institutional and personal obstacles on the construction of participants’ professional identity. A group of ten Mexican PSTs in the eighth semester of their nine semester SLTE programme were research participants. This qualitative interpretative case study employed written reflections, asynchronous discussion forum transcripts, critical incidents, individual face to face interviews and a focus group session as methods of data collection. Data is analysed through sociocultural theory, positioning theory and interpretive discourse analysis employing Fairclough's (2003) discourse analysis model. Results revealed that multiple factors affected PSTs’ identity. These include participants’ past world experiences, practicum experiences and connections with colleagues and learners within communities of practice, knowledge of subject matter, teaching pedagogy, classroom management, and dealing with challenges in resource poor environments. The findings of this study contribute to the formulation of global knowledge and theory about language teachers’ learning which may benefit policy, theory and practice in the field of initial teacher education.

Critical pedagogy (CP) as a philosophy of education and social movement has been debated for nearly five decades now and inspired many educators and researchers in various fields including English language teaching. Although the original scope of CP was to develop both theory and practice (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1997; Osborne, 1990; Sweet, 1998), discussions have been mostly focussing on the former and not much work has been done to implement CP in actual classroom practice (Akbari, 2008; Christensen & Aldridge, 2013; Davari, 2011; Gore, 1993, 2003). Moreover, research on classroom practice that is situated within this framework only rarely provides a comprehensive, empirically based analysis thus would not lay the groundwork for further discussion and a deeper understanding of pedagogical practice, its process and outcomes. More importantly, the research conducted within the paradigm of CP usually does not include the viewpoints of the learners despite their role assigned by CP theory to develop CP-oriented practices in collaboration with teachers (Crookes, 2012; Shor & Freire, 1987a; Wong, 2006); this has led to an important gap and the lack of a solid body of research on educational practices conducted within this framework. This qualitative case study explores how an approach to CP was conceptualised, practised and experienced in an English language teaching context by its participants including the teacher and the learners in a higher education institution in Iran. The study stands out as important due to the fact that in the Iranian education system lecturing still prevails as the dominant teaching method, and pedagogical key concepts of CP including dialogue and critical thinking are widely ignored (Aliakbari & Allahmoradi, 2012; Sadeghi, 2008; Sedeghi & Ketab, 2009; Shakouri Masouleh & Ronaghifard Abkenar, 2012). Therefore, this case study presents and analyses a rare example in the Iranian educational context where CP is still in an initial phase (Ghaemi & Piran, 2014; Safari & Pourhashemi, 2012). This study investigates how the teacher explains and implements his teaching philosophy and method based on his approach to CP. For this purpose, interviews, audio recordings of classroom interaction and my personal field notes were examined through thematic analysis. Moreover, considering ‘dialogue ‘as the basis of a dialogic critical approach to teaching, the study explores how‘dialogic discussion’ as the teacher’s advocated pedagogical method, in line with other dialogic critical pedagogy advocates (Bartlett, 2005, 2008; Dysthe, 2011; Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1994; Pollack & Kodikant, 2011; Roberts, 2000; Shor, 1980, 1992, 1993; Shor & Freire, 1987a, 1987b), was contextualised and practised. To this end, class discourse analysis was implemented to investigate the role and importance of dialogue in whole class discussions based on Lefstein and Snell's (2014) six approaches to dialogue. In addition to this, the study explores the learners’ viewpoints on the teacher’s main teaching method in practice. This is done through thematic analysis of two questionnaires handed to the learners at the beginning and the end of the three month fieldwork period, focus group discussions and the reflective diaries the learners developed throughout the course. These data sources are examined and triangulated to set the ground for discussing further how the teacher’s advocated theory and method align or not with his actual teaching practice and how his theory and practice align or not with positions expressed in CP literature and discussion within the field of ELT in general terms and in Iran particularly. The findings show that beside a need for theorising and practising CP, it is also necessary to develop a comprehensive analysis of the classroom discourse within a dialogic critical framework. While indoctrination and ideological imposition have been pointed to as the great risk of applying CP in the literature, their unfolding in practice is still under-theorised (Biesta, 1998; Burbules & Berk, 1999; Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2003; Matusov, 2009; Matusov & Wegerif, 2014; Matusov & Lemke, 2015; Matusov & Miyazaki, 2014; McArthur, 2010a, 2010b; Mejía, 2004; Palmer & Emmons, 2004). Therefore, a comprehensive analysis enables critical pedagogues to develop a critical stance towards their own and other’s personal theories and their role in educational practice, and to raise awareness for the risk of misusing dialogue as a means of indoctrination and imposing one’s views on others while believing in one’s own strong commitment to dialogue and dialogic knowledge construction. On the one hand, such a research focus helps to conceptualise further the conditions under which CP can, or fails to, unfold its potential as a tool for empowerment and liberation. On the other, this study contributes to building a body of educational practice whose participants self-identify as participating in CP, and thereby adds to the work on how an approach to CP is implemented and carried out in class discourse, which is in need to be studied and analysed (Sarroub & Quadros, 2015). The results of this study also highlight the significance of including the learners’ voice in order to have a more comprehensive picture of the educational process, including the dynamics of actual classroom interactions and the perceived impact of teaching on the learners in this environment. This is specifically crucial where banking education prevails and the learners are unfamiliar with and unaccustomed to the basic principles and requirements of a critical dialogic teaching. By laying open the workings and mechanisms of these dimensions, both CP theory and practice can develop in parallel and the further shortcomings and risks can be noticed and avoided.