Second Dialect Acquisition (SDA) might represent a conceptually different task to that of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) for three main related reasons. Firstly, the learner’s ability to ‘notice’ dialect differences due to the shared linguistic features of the two dialects, might make separation more difficult (Siegel, 2010b, p. 68; Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 1998, p. 287). Secondly, due to the linguistic overlap between two related dialects, it is thought that speakers make themselves generally understood by one another and dialect differences can be considered ‘communicatively redundant’ (Long, 2007, p. 62). It has also been said that this can impact upon the learner’s motivation (Berry & Hudson, 1997) or levels of ‘investment’ (Peirce, 1995; Nero, 2014) in acquiring a second dialect. Lastly, the relationship between the two dialects can represent societal systems of inequality (Bourdieu, 1991) and therefore the identities of second dialect learners and their investment to learn the standard form needs to be positioned within this power dynamic (Malcolm & Koningsberg, 2001, p. 27; Peirce, 1995). In this thesis, two cross-sectional studies were undertaken. Firstly, Indigenous primary school aged children (6 to 12-years old) in Far North Queensland who spoke English as an additional language and/or dialect (EAL/D) (n = 54) participated in two tasks designed to understand whether dialect differences were noticed: elicited imitation of Standard Australian English (SAE) target sentences and an alternative forced choice task that asked participants whether two utterances were, verbatim, the “same” or “different”. Results were compared with native monolingual SAE speakers (n = 44) who did the same tasks. Secondly, a teaching intervention of three lessons that employed the ‘contrastive approach’ to SDA was conducted with Yarrie Lingo (YL) speaking participants in years 1, 3 and 5 (n = 27) to explore differences between YL and SAE and hopefully, improve participants’ ability to “notice” the differences. Findings showed that dialect differences were not always noticed for all participants, but for the EAL/D groups it was far more difficult to notice the grammatical features of SAE, and some features were more salient or readily acquired than others. Over the years of schooling, participants’ ability to notice the targeted SAE grammatical items improved. The teaching intervention showed that the YL group found it very difficult to effectively separate the two languages and code-switch between them, despite their explicit knowledge of the grammatical rules, suggesting SDA is potentially more difficult due to the slight linguistic distance between their first dialect, D1 and their second, D2. The argument for communicative redundancy is less convincing. In the space of a simple sentence, dialect differences were found to be communicatively redundant 29-30% of the time, which seems like a lot, but more often than not, the meaning was lost. In longer stretches of communication that extend beyond a simple sentence, particularly in the context of the academic demands of schooling, it is very likely that there will be a breakdown in communication between a YL speaker and an SAE speaker. Findings suggest that SDA presents a greater challenge not just for the slight linguistic differences between D1 and D2, but also for the complex social, cultural, historical and political factors that underpin D1 and D2 as nonstandard and standard languages. The argument presented is that children’s linguistic identities are crucial in SDA and that instruction must start there. Consequently, traditional hierarchical understandings of language awareness developmental processes, such as those described in the language awareness continuum (Angelo & Carter, 2015) need to be rethought. They position an examination of the social and historical factors influencing language in society as a higher order skill that is developed after language awareness and standard language proficiency is gained through contrastive analysis. This study suggests that students are unlikely to engage with contrastive analysis and standard language acquisition in a meaningful way, without first addressing their social and cultural realities. It is evident, however, that the learning needs of Indigenous Australian children who are acquiring SAE as a second dialect in the Australian schooling system, are not fully understood. Current research lacks evidence. This study sought to address this void, in doing so, it illustrates how linguistically and socially complex the situation is. SDA appears to significantly differ from traditional SLA in some very important and challenging ways, but much more research is urgently needed to address present-day inequities for Indigenous EAL/D learners in the schooling system.

Sixteen-hundred years after the Roman elegist Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (c15–5 BCE) articulated the lament of abandoned heroines (and one historical figure: Sappho) writing and responding to their heroes, several male baroque poets re-ventriloquised Ovid’s epistolary interlocutors. Leading seventeenth-century literary presence Giambattista Marino was himself an early exponent of the form, which he describes as “imitated from Ovid” (“imitate da Ovidio”) in his ‘Lira’ (1614 CE). My research considers why and how these little-studied Seicento texts—produced by Marinist circles affiliated with the libertine Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti—reinterpret Ovid’s ventriloquism, and what this indicates about seventeenth-century attitudes toward gendered writing. A largely overlooked niche in the reception of Ovid’s unique elegies, many of these baroque poems are yet to be examined by scholars. My close readings compare the new ‘updates’ to popular early modern Latin and vernacular Italian ‘Heroides’ editions of the seventeenth century, revealing the significance of Ovid's collection for the dominance of elite men in Marinist literary culture.

In Russian, the statistically dominant order of the subject and the verb in the clause is SVO. However, in a number of linguistic environments, the verb precedes the subject, either following a language convention or establishing an unconventional pattern. This research project provides an account of unconventional verb-initial patterns (VIPs) – namely, VSO, VOS and VS – considering both the syntactic and the pragmatic factors that influence their occurrence in written discourse. Building on previous research of early Russian texts, this study extends the scope of investigation and analyses texts from six different genres and/or time periods: 15th-century travel diary, 18th-19th-century travel diaries, 19th-century classic folk tales, 20th-century narratives, 21st-century modern tales, and 21st-century blog entries. It is argued that unconventional VIPs are best understood within a single analytical framework which addresses pattern variation, information structure and communicative effects of VSO, VOS and VS word order combinations. Previous research accounted, to some extent, for the use of verb-initial word order variations in oral and written discourse, as grammatical, syntactic and, above all, stylistic means of information packaging. Specifically, the theory of functional sentence perspective has provided valuable insight into the information structure of Russian sentence elements, with individual studies outlining the pragmatic effects of using particular VIPs. However, there has been limited empirical investigation of unconventional VIPs across a range of genres and time periods, and little to no attention given to the significance of pattern variation within and across VIPs. Overall, the results of this study show that the use of unconventional VIPs has not only declined over the modern Russian period, but that there is substantial variation across genres, both in terms of the VSO, VOS and VS groups of patterns and in terms of their correlation with information structure and communicative effects. Furthermore, the study reveals that across the six corpora: VOS patterns are infrequent, compared to VSO and VS combinations; VS modified by adjuncts is the most frequently occurring VIP; and VSO without adjuncts (i.e. pure VSO) with Split Rheme information structure is the strongest correlation of word order and information structure. Furthermore, VSO combinations also strongly correlate with discourse management effects in all corpora and with syntactic communicative effects in the 18th-19th-century travel diaries, while VS patterns produce both syntactic and stylistic communicative effects in the 15th-century travel diary. Moreover, the second most prominent group of communicative effects is discourse management devices, particularly, in the 20th-century narratives and the 21st-century modern tales, which are produced by unconventional VIPs with Split Rheme information structure. Rhematised Verb information structure producing stylistic communicative effects was found to be a feature of the 19th-century classic folk tales, whereas Clause Focus producing stylistic effects were found to be a feature of 21st-century blog entries. Finally, this study shows that the 15th-century travel diary stands apart from the five modern Russian corpora in terms of pattern variation, information packaging and pragmatic use, signalling that more research of this early Russian period is warranted.

Deeper and wider processes of globalisation have contributed to increased mobility in society. As more people move across borders along with their personal histories, cultures and languages, transnational places and diaspora communities have become ideal sites of research (Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton, & Spotti, 2016; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015). Recently, there has been unprecedented interest in sociolinguistic phenomena in superdiverse, metropolitan cities, giving rise to the emergence of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic landscape originally referred to the languages used on publicly visible street signs, such as shop signs, advertisements and road signs (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006). Later, the definition was expanded to account for the use of all semiotic resources, including linguistic forms, in the public arena (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). Despite ongoing efforts to document and describe urban landscapes in different parts of the world (Blackwood, Lanza, & Woldemariam, 2016), little work to date has attempted to formulate a comprehensive response to recent trends in linguistic landscape research. As a fledgling field of study, linguistic landscape research has received wide criticism for employing a crude type of quantitative analysis that regards languages as clearly definable units (Blommaert, 2019). The fact that the linguistic landscape perspective can incorporate different fields of sociolinguistics, such as research on minority languages, also raises questions about its theoretical and methodological paths (Van Mensel, Vandenbrouke, & Blackwood, 2017). Drawing on frameworks grounded in geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), superdiversity (Blommaert, 2013) and metrolingualism (Pennycook, 2017), this thesis aims to interrogate the theory, methodology, framing of power and relevance of linguistic landscape research. For this purpose, I employ an ethnographically oriented approach to examine three complex case studies of the linguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in Victoria, Australia. Throughout the thesis, I gradually construct the coherent argument that linguistic landscape research benefits from a geosemiotic theory, an ethnographic methodology, a social semiotic perspective to power relations and an exploration of social media landscape. Findings of the three case studies shed light on how semiotic resources are purposefully employed to construct nostalgia, power and identity. Overall, the thesis expands the theoretical and methodological reach of linguistic landscape research by interrogating the urban-centric perspective, adopting an assemblage view of sign systems, offering a triadic framework for power relations, and pushing the boundaries of linguistic landscapes.

This dissertation investigates the prosodic structure of French and the Oceanic language Drehu, spoken by a small bilingual community on the island of Lifou, in the South Pacific. Lifou is a remote island belonging to the archipelago of New Caledonia, localised more than 16000 km away from mainland France. Although officially a French overseas territory, live in Lifou is to a large degree organised according to customary tradition of the indigenous population, the Kanak people. There is no obvious societal majority language on the island and French and Drehu are commonly spoken by the indigenous population, who make up the majority of the inhabitants. The aim of this examination is to develop a phonetic prosodic model for the two languages and determine whether there are effects of prosodic transfer between the two languages of bilingual speakers. Of particular interest is the the phonetic description of prominence and phrasing of the two languages for a categorisation of their prosodic typology. This thesis presents five studies dealing with (i) the acoustics of Drehu word prosody, (ii) the acoustic correlates of intonational structure in Lifou French, (iii) the acoustic durational properties of Lifou French, (iv) the acoustics of prominence marking and phrasing in Drehu, and (v) acoustic cues used in word recognition in Drehu and French. The speech and perception data for these studies were collected during four field work trips to the island of Lifou, where more than 100 adult and teenage speakers participated. To investigate processing in the French language and incorporate a monolingual control group, additional experimental work was conducted in the facilities of the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix Marseille University, CNRS, in Aix-en-Provence, in metropolitan France. A variety of methods, typically used in laboratory phonology, such as controlled reading tasks or a forced choice word identification experiment were employed. For exploration and interpretation of the data, all five studies include a statistical analysis. This work puts forward a revised model of Drehu word prosody and postulates an intonation phonological account of the language. In addition, the intonational phonology of Lifou French is documented, providing the first description of this previously undocumented variety. Building on this descriptive work and taking into consideration previous phonetic research on the speech production and prosody of bilingual speakers, the role of sociolinguistic motivations and functional constraints is discussed. This dissertation highlights the relevance of applying detailed acoustic descriptions to under-documented languages which are poorly understood regarding their prosodic systems. It contributes to the documentation of the languages in the Oceanic region and advances our understanding of bilingual speech processes.

The orchestral ensemble exists as a group of people who come together to prepare for public performance of music and has done so for several hundred years. In this thesis I examine the interactions which occur during this process in a current day professional orchestra. My focus is on analysing how members of the orchestra, the orchestral organisation and the conductor use their bodies, artefacts, time and space. My approach to examining these behaviours is informed by social interaction methodologies and theories of distributed cognition. Chapter 5 presents an ethnographic account of the construction of space and delineation of time for rehearsal. I examine how the City Symphony Orchestra (CSO) and their management use both space and time to prioritise and privilege the work of the orchestra. Chapter 6 focuses on conductor gestures and I use this analysis to argue that the gestures are complex with components occurring simultaneously as well as sequentially. I argue that conductor gesture creates its own context as it is deployed interactionally and is deeply embedded within social and cultural context. I use the theory of composite utterances to demonstrate that conductor gesture is more than a simple single sign per semantic unit. Chapter 7 considers how orchestral musicians organise their cognition within the physical and social environment of the rehearsal. I show that orchestral musicians distribute their cognition across their bodies, other interactants and culturally constructed artefacts. I further argue that understanding musician cognition in this way allows us to see that the very purpose of orchestral rehearsal is to transform the internal, individual cognition into the external and shared. Chapter 8 shifts the focus of analysis onto the talk-based interaction between conductor, concertmaster and other players within the rehearsal. I approach this talk using analysis which allows me to focus on the epistemic stance taking that occurs. I show that musicians are highly aware of sources of knowledge and knowing within the rehearsal process. I argue that musicians use their own bodies as sources of knowing and orient to them as important to the rehearsal interaction. Chapter 9 presents an ethnographic account of a CSO performance and considers the orchestra as a social situation. I argue that observability and monitoring occur across the social situation in both visual and aural modalities but that the access to others is asymmetrically constructed by the social roles of the orchestra. I focus on the first violin section using the leadership gestural actions as an example of this asymmetry. Chapter 10 discusses my analyses and proposes several novel contributions to existing research on how stance taking occurs in group interactions. This research is based on original fieldwork with an orchestra referred to by the pseudonym ‘City Symphony Orchestra’ (CSO) within this thesis.

In late 1920s’ Spain, Elena Fortun (pseudonym of Encarnacion Aragoneses, 1886-1952) started publishing “Celia y su mundo”, considered the best children's books series of the time. Her innovative character, Celia, tries to make sense of a world dictated by grown-ups and continually attempts to escape their impositions. Through the voice of a character belonging to two traditionally marginalized groups, children and women, Fortun found a way to transmit progressive messages to her readers. However, as she gets older, the character who broke the mould with her transgressive behaviour and convincing speech, gradually adapts to what is expected of her. The historical events reflected in the books range from the final years of Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, to the historical advances of feminism during the Republic and their loss during Franco's dictatorship after the Civil War (1936-1939). This thesis contends that the Celia series planted the seed of postwar bildungsroman for Carmen Laforet (1921-2004), Carmen Martin Gaite (1925-2000) and Ana Maria Matute (1925-2014), who read Celia in their childhood and whose novels featured teenage girls fleeing their oppressive households. The trace of Fortun’s Celia is analysed in the works: Nada (1944) and La isla y los demonios (1952), by Laforet; Entre visillos (1952) and El cuarto de atras (1978), by Martin Gaite; and Los Abel (1948) and Primera memoria (1959), by Matute. By breaking the rules of children’s literature, usually didactic and moralistic, Fortun created a character that paved the way to arguably the first generation of Spanish women writers. Celia was considered a rebel just because she could not make sense of her status quo, which continually limited her existence to that of a silent secondary character. Frustrated, Celia spoke to her girl readers who considered themselves raras for pretty much the same reasons and who created brave, nonconformist female characters years later.

Amidst accelerating globalisation, international students currently occupy a sizeable percentage of university enrolments in English-speaking countries. Of these countries, Australia has the highest ratio of international student tertiary enrolments at 21.5% (OECD, 2019). Due to this ongoing trend, the validity of high-stakes language tests has become more vital than ever before. For language tests to be valid for university entrance, they should elicit language that is relevant and applicable to successful university participation. This relates to the extrapolation of language elicited by tests to university contexts (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). The purpose of this study is to investigate the relevance of language elicited by IELTS Academic Writing Task 2 (WT2) to successful graduate-level university writing produced for the Master of Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. To date, studies investigating IELTS extrapolation have yielded limited evidence with little relevance to stakeholders. The present study addresses this issue by interviewing stakeholders about language needs and using the interview results to inform functional move-step analyses (Swales, 1990, 2004) of test and assignment writing for comparison. The results suggest that IELTS Academic WT2 is only somewhat relevant to successful university writing and highlight the need for students to develop skills in defining disciplinary concepts and interpreting study results. The results also suggest that IELTS scores should be interpreted with caution, given that claims pertaining to score use currently rest on weak extrapolation evidence. The methodological approach of the study demonstrates the potential to provide stronger extrapolation evidence if applied to broader contexts.

Aimed at identifying learners’ strengths and weaknesses on specific skills or contents, diagnostic assessment can provide fine-grained information to formatively promote teaching, learning, and language development in an ongoing language classroom (Alderson, et al., 2015, Elder, 2017; Jang, 2012; Knoch & Macqueen, 2017; Lee, 2015). While much research has developed diagnostic tools for large-scale standardised assessment, few have constructed diagnostic instruments for low-stakes formative classroom assessment. To contribute to the existing knowledge of diagnostic language assessment (e.g., Alderson et al., 2015; Jang, 2012; Knoch, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; Lee, 2015), this PhD research aimed to (1) develop a diagnostic rating scale for a formative diagnostic assessment to diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses in academic writing products and support ongoing teaching and learning in an EFL university classroom, and (2) explore the validity of the assessment claims following an argument-based approach to validation (Chapelle et al., 2008, 2010; Kane, 1992, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b; Knoch & Chapelle, 2018). To this end, this research employed a multistage exploratory sequential mixed-methods design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018) to undertake the scale development and validation over three study stages: scale construction, scale trialling, and scale implementation. Following the line of a multisource-driven approach to scale development (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2015; Knoch, 2007, 2009b; Montee & Malone, 2014), the scale was constructed and revised on the basis of theories of L2 writing ability, existing scales, expert intuition, and classroom curriculum. The scale was operationally implemented over the course of one semester in four writing classrooms, in which 80 English-major undergraduates used the scale to write, self-diagnose, and revise their assignment essays, and five teachers applied the scale to diagnose the students’ essays and use diagnostic results to support teaching and learning. The teachers and twenty students were interviewed regarding their perceptions of the scale and assessment. The diagnostic scores were analysed using Classical Test Theory, Many-Facets Rasch, correlation, regression, and ANOVA statistics, and the perception protocols were analysed following a qualitative content analysis. Overall, findings offered reasonable support for the overarching validity argument for the scale-driven assessment system. Yet, the different writing tasks to which the scale was applied over the course of instruction made it difficult to reliably gauge student progress, highlighting the need for stronger evidence relating to the consequence inference. This limits the usefulness of a measurement-driven assessment approach in detecting learning progression over the course. In addition, the current validation framework, driven by Kane’s argument-based approach, appeared not to well capture the dynamic and varying evidentiary sources of learning and writing development in the classroom assessment. The present study provides implications for developing a diagnostic rating scale for diagnostic purposes in a formative assessment, and examining the validity of the assessment within the context of EFL language classroom.

This thesis is a conversation analytic and poststructuralist study of discourses and social categories. In particular, it analyses how discursive categories of race, sexuality and gender operate in talk among a group of Chinese lesbians, and how the categories produced by these discourses are implemented in, and potentially reshaped by, interaction. The data which is presented and analysed in this thesis comes from a corpus of approximately 16 hours of audio recordings of conversations between and with Chinese lesbians who live in Melbourne, Australia. The thesis has two main aims. Firstly, it analyses how discourses operate in interaction. It does this by locating moments in interaction where discourses of race, sexuality and gender are oriented to. It shows how categories of race are resisted in ambiguous interactional projects; categories of sexuality are shown to operate and potentially alter in repair sequences; and categories of gender are shown to operate and be normalised in storytelling sequences. Secondly, the thesis aims to develop a critical conversation analysis methodology. In order to achieve this aim, the thesis builds on feminist and critically-oriented conversation analysis (CA) to develop and implement critical CA. This methodology finds points of compatibility between CA and poststructuralism. The implementation of this methodology also contributes to the long-standing debate between conversation analysts and critically-oriented discourse analysts about the compatibility between poststructuralist and conversation analytic epistemologies. The thesis concludes that critical CA can indeed be used to show the operation of discourses in mundane, everyday interaction. This can improve our understanding of how social categories are produced, sustained, resisted, and even potentially altered. Such findings may allow us to contribute an understanding of the operation of discourse to a political project of reducing discrimination based on social categories.

Understanding the roles of spoken and sign phonological code in reading processes is important for educators of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. However, the pool of data on this topic is limited and has mostly centered on readers of alphabetic languages. In places like Hong Kong, where deaf signers are relatively few, the shortage of research on phonological processing during reading is even more severe. This thesis addressed this problem by investigating the cognitive processes underlying Chinese reading in Hong Kong deaf readers using two methodological approaches, eye movements and event-related potentials, across four separate studies. Studies 1 and 2 used the error disruption paradigm with eye-tracking to investigate the patterns of orthographic and phonological activation in hearing and deaf readers. The hearing reader data suggested that they rely mostly on orthography to access word meanings in early processing. However, early phonological activation was found to be facilitated top-down by semantics when targets were predictable. The deaf readers were also found to rely primarily on orthographic information to access word meanings, but phonological code played a role in late processing and was modulated by contextual predictability and reading level. Study 3 used a parafoveal preview paradigm with eye-tracking to investigate how sign phonologically related previews affect reading processes in Hong Kong deaf readers. The pattern of results suggested that these readers activate sign phonological representations when reading Chinese words and that different sign phonological parameters (i.e., handshape, location, and movement) have different effects on parafoveal processing. Study 4 investigated orthographic, spoken phonological, and sign phonological processing in Hong Kong deaf readers using two error disruption paradigms with ERPs, focusing on the P200 and N400 components. The results for Experiment 1 revealed that N400 amplitudes were reduced in the orthographic condition, which suggested that orthographic representations were facilitating lexical access. In the homophonic condition, N400 amplitudes were increased in the right central eleci trodes. In Experiment 2, P200 amplitudes were significantly reduced in the left anterior electrodes in the sign phonological condition. In sum, the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 suggest that the early P200 component is modulated by sign phonology, and the later N400 component is modulated by orthography and spoken phonology in Hong Kong deaf readers. In sum, these studies suggest that while deaf readers tend to activate word meanings directly through orthography, they can also activate spoken phonological and sign phonological codes. Consistently across the eye movement and ERP studies, the effects of sign phonological activation emerged in early stages of processing, and the effects of spoken phonology emerged in later stages of processing. The different time courses of spoken and sign phonological activation may be an indication that deaf readers tend to use sign representations to activate word meanings and spoken phonological representations for later integrative processes. In conclusion, these findings can be taken to suggest that both types of phonological code are important for deaf readers.

Numerous studies have shown that native phonotactic constraints influence listeners’ perception of non-native speech. These studies typically show that speech which violates the phonotactic rules of the listener’s native language is often misperceived as speech that adheres to native phonotactics, behaviour which is often characterised as phonotactically conditioned perceptual repair. The present thesis extends these findings by examining the effects of language-specific listener expectation on non-native speech perception. The central hypothesis presented within is that sequences of speech that are unexpected by the listener are often misperceived as sequences that are expected. This suggests that phonotactically conditioned perceptual repair is not necessarily caused by an innate understanding of the listener’s native phonotactic constraints: sequences of speech that contain phonotactic violations may be considered as one extreme of a continuum of expectedness. Additionally, the present thesis explores the relationship between predictability and attention. The studies presented show that listeners pay less attention to incoming speech input when they can make predictions regarding upcoming input based upon preceding materials. The present thesis tests these hypotheses in six studies conducted on native Japanese speakers. These experiments use allophonic variability, transitional probability, and word frequency as measures of expectation. The results confirm the central hypothesis, they show that listeners misperceive sequences of speech that are improbable in Japanese. The way that listeners misperceive speech is also found to be dependent on expectation, when presented with unexpected speech that may be repaired in multiple ways, listeners experience the more probable illusion.