Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language Theses

English language education in Brazilian private school systems is undergoing changes.

Several school systems have opted for the implementation of an American high school curriculum using a Content-based Instruction (CBI) or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) curricular framework within which students apply their language skills to learning subject specific academic content. High School International (HSI) is one of the providers of a CLIL curriculum. In this descriptive case study of the implementation of the HSI CLIL curriculum in a private boarding school in the Southeast of Brazil respective stakeholders were interviewed and their experiences have been described and analyzed. Certain critical aspects have been identified. Involvement of the school principal and administration is one of the key ingredients of a successful implementation. Planning the implementation months in advance, such as preparing the curriculum, course outlines, and schedules, training of teachers, staff, and academic coordinator, definitely eases the whole process.

This study investigated the use of lexical bundles in research articles written in English by Turkish scholars. For the purpose of the study, a corpus of published research articles produced by Turkish scholars in six different academic disciplines was collected. The four-word lexical bundles that appeared at least twenty times in this one million word corpus were identified and further analyzed both structurally and functionally based on the previous taxonomies developed by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999) and Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004). The results of this study revealed that the lexical bundles found have structural correlates as well as strong functional features that help to construct discourse in academic writing. The conclusions drawn from this study could be applied to the teaching of academic genres to researchers in English as a Foreign Language context and are expected to provide insights for further corpus-based studies in academic writing.

The inability to differentiate the English vowels /o/ and / O/ has become a stigmatized marker of a lower prestige and widespread dialect of Sri Lankan English. This lower prestige (LP) dialect is often referred to with the derogative phrase “Not pot English”. This study aims to investigate the production of the vowel contrast by native Sinhala speakers of English. To this end, speech samples of three adult learners were analyzed. The findings of the study are discussed according to hypotheses of the Speech Learning Model, which suggests that the existent L1 specific phonetic categories hinder the formation of new L2 sound categories. Here, sounds that are similar, but not identical to L1 sounds are considered to be the most difficult to acquire. Also, the percentage of L1 use and the age of second language acquisition seem to have influenced the production of the vowels. Finally, in order to address this pronunciation issue, an instructional framework to teach pronunciation is proposed.