This book has been designed to guide students through the main phases in writing and presenting an undergraduate, MA or PhD dissertation. These include choosing a topic, carrying out the review of literature, gathering and analyzing data, writing up the dissertation, and, finally, preparing and delivering a presentation within the context of a viva. This eminently practical manual has been written in a reader-friendly style. Theoretical explanations are complemented by numerous examples for analysis and illustration as well as activities to apply, practise, and review the notions introduced in each chapter.

This book presents a collection of thematically focused articles addressing culture-specific features of academic communication, with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an Additional Language and directed at multicultural audiences. It comprises papers arranged in four sections: Expert writers, Novice writers and readers, Conference participants, and Non-research academic genres. The book explicitly addresses and is centred upon the concept of a research niche understood as a space to be captured and populated, as a temporary location to move or grow out of in the course of individual professional development from novice to expert, and as a space to consciously reach beyond, delimited by one’s linguistic, cultural, educational, and geopolitical background. Here the niche is approached as a frame of reference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices.

Academic Writing and Reader Engagement offers a concise linguistic description of the use and functions of questions in English, French and Spanish and discusses their value to the teaching of academic writing. This book: Enables a better understanding of how writers engage readers in academic writing in English, French, and Spanish and where each language behaves similarly or differently; Explains how authors express opinions, organise discourse and create relationships with readers via questions in their academic writing and the various functions questions perform; Brings together research on corpus and contrastive linguistics, highlighting how these two fields can support one another; Offers a thorough investigation of reader engagement markers from a range of linguistic perspectives and considers how knowledge of these markers could be applied to the teaching and learning of academic writing in each language; Employs corpus data totalling approximately 1.2 million words from all three languages to illustrate the varying roles and representations of questions in each language. Providing an invaluable resource for scholars learning to communicate successfully within their academic community, as well as teachers of English, French and/or Spanish for academic purposes, this book is key reading for students and researchers of academic discourse, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Beginning from the premise that being non-racist – and other ‘neutral’ positions – are inadequate in the face of a racist society and institutions, this book provides language educators with practical tools to implement antiracist pedagogy in their classrooms. It offers readers a solid theoretical grounding for its practical suggestions, drawing on work in critical race theory, critical sociolinguistics and language ideology to support its argument for antiracist pedagogy as a necessary form of direct action. The author contends that antiracist pedagogy is a crucial part of the project of decolonizing universities, which goes beyond tokenistic diversity initiatives and combats racism in institutions that have historically helped to perpetuate it. The author’s pedagogical suggestions are accompanied by online resources which will help the reader to adapt and develop the material in the book for their own classrooms.

What does 'autonomy' mean within language learning? Should it be enhanced within national, institutional or small group culture and, if so, how can that be done? A variety of new theoretical perspectives are here firmly anchored in research data from projects worldwide. By foregrounding cultural issues and thus explicitly addressing the concerns of many educators on the appropriateness and feasibility of developing learner autonomy in practice, this book fills a gap in the literature and offers practical benefits to language teachers.