This Booklet is not designed to give an introduction to or even a general view of a study of Anglistics. The collection of essays and studies originates from my own master study of English Language and Literature at the European University of Cyprus. I arranged the term papers, which I prepared for the different courses in temporal order. This seems a bit arbitrary at a first glance, it is however completely accidental, as I had not much choice in choosing my courses. In order to complete my studies in four semesters I had to enroll in whatever course my alma mater was able to offer. Almost. There was one “special topics“- course to select during the study, and I refused to choose a continuation course in Teaching Methodology. As I had deliberately refrained from entering a TESOL-course of studies, I had felt even the first Methodology-course to be a bit out of place. For the same reason, I decided not to include the respective term paper in this collection, although the class was quite interesting and instructive after all.

My first essay belongs to the course “Postcolonial Studies”. There is no need to mention that “Zorba the Greek” was no topic of this class. It is, however, always exciting to leave the trodden path and see if you can find fresh ideas by looking at well-known literature through new glasses.

The paper on “learning a language” investigates one of many topics covered in the course “Core Issues in Language Acquisition”. It is amazing how much there can be learned about language by occupying oneself with its acquisition. Accordingly, this essay is of interest not only for developmental scientists, but for everybody interested in linguistics.

In our class “Theories of Literature” again, there was a wild field covered in a few months. Every theory, one gets acquainted with, opens new views on literature, and the more views we have on it the more fascinating it becomes. Speaking of fascination, it is quite easy for the reader to feel my fascination for intertextuality in the third essay. Get infected!

At the latest in my study about orientalism in a practice I cannot conceal my first profession nor my nationality. Yes, it was written for the course “Cultural Studies” and it is astonishing how much it influenced my own views on intercultural problems in daily life.

The next two papers originate from the class “English in Globalization”. Once again, even two essays can´t reflect the unmeasurable diversity of varieties of English. Therefore, they should be understood as no more than appetizers, covering only very small topics of a very large field. Don´t hesitate to taste- there is enough food for everybody´s brain!

I you read of a class titled “Research Methods”, you don´t feel that this will be a really exciting course. It was, however, not only very useful to get instruction in structuring studies, but turned out to be more and more gripping, the more one´s own study was at stake. My paper on attitudes of EFL-teachers would have probably looked different, if I had written it after the course and not during it. Still, the opportunity of occupying oneself with the topic of English as lingua franca is definitely worth reading it.

Finally, there is my study on language in a fashion magazine. It clearly shows, how the attempt to fulfil an assignment can develop into a more and more fascinating occupation with a new topic. Of course, these considerations of “English on top” just scratch a tiny aspect of the vast area covered in the class “Discourse Analysis”. In fact, Discourse Analysis helps us to understand what we do all the time, and accordingly this course helped me to understand what I had studied all the time. It is no coincicence that terms and topics of other courses kept reappearing permanently. This might be called experienced intertextuality. The comprehensive field of discourse analysis provided me with a frame for all information and knowledge obtained by this study.

One important notion of discourse analysis is that any form of discourse not only influences the language of its participants but also is influenced by their language. If my writing in some places seems to be unusual or even unappropriate for scientific texts, I am happy to have contributed my share of this influence on academic discourse with this booklet.