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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The focus of this study concerns the impact of an in-service teacher training (INSET) course on experienced secondary school English teachers under the wide environment of educational reform in China. Although there has been increased research on the influence of Chinese educational reform on English education, the impact of INSET course on teachers and their implementation of the new curriculum was a previously unexplored area. This qualitative multiple-case study investigated five secondary school EFL teachers throughout the INSET course and in a six-month follow-up period. Classroom observation data and interview data were collected at multiple points of time. This methodological approach introduced a longitudinal dimension to the study which enabled any possible change in teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and practice to be investigated. Theories in teacher learning and development were used to explore the extent to which the INSET course made sense to the teachers’ professional lives. The findings indicated a lack of significant change in the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs and therefore no fundamental change in their subsequent practice to support the new curriculum. The inconsistency between the teachers’ learning outcomes and practices was mainly because their theory-learning, the focus of the INSET course, did not work as major drive for the teachers’ behavioural change. Increase in theoretical knowledge did not necessarily mean any change in concrete classroom practices even though the teachers made some short-term theory-practice application. After the INSET course the teachers mostly returned to their habitual practices which were largely influenced by their deeply-rooted prior beliefs. The relevant factors, from the INSET course and the wider context, were also examined as working elements to contribute to the lack of significant change through a context-sensitive lens. Implications for in-service teacher education and INSET course design and implementation were also drawn based on the findings.

This study analyses the stories of five Tibetan individual journeys of becoming bilingual in the Tibetan areas of China at four different points in time from 1950 to the present. The data consists of the narratives of their bilingual experiences. They talked about their experiences of using language in family, in village and in school. Their narratives show that their opportunities to develop bilingualism were intimately linked with historical and political events in the wider layers of experiences, which reveals the complexity of bilingualism. Moreover, my five participants struggled to become bilingual. They struggled because they wanted to keep two languages in their lives. It illustrates their relationship with society. They are Tibetans, L1 is not the official language of their country, but it is the tie with their ethnicity. It addresses bilingualism linked with the formation of identity. A narrative method within an ethnographic research approach was used in this research. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory was used to explain how the layers of experiences fundamentally influenced the development of bilingualism. Holland et al.’s concept of history in person was used to explain why an individual’s formation of identity is affected by their experience of developing bilingualism. Furthermore, the view of language as repertoire also used to explain why Tibetans need two languages in their lives, thus emphasising the importance of understanding bilingualism from a social-cultural perspective. These three theoretical frames together provide tools to better understand the complexity of bilingualism. This study found that my five participants’ opportunities to become bilingual were heavily affected by the transition of society and change of policies towards the Tibetan language. Moreover, their stories show that bilingualism is a social phenomenon, which happened because my five participants interacted with two languages in their daily life. Therefore we need to see bilingualism from a social-cultural perspective and understand the complexity of bilingualism for education policy and practice. In addition, this study found that my five participants’ experiences of developing bilingualism led the path of developing identity. It shows that language played a very important role in the formation of identity for my five participants. Moreover, their experiences demonstrate the relationship between identity and education; education may either facilitate or impede an individual’s identity development.

What is education? What counts as education? How should we conceptualise education? These are the questions which arose during this ethnography of Broadway conducted between 2011 and 2012 and involving archival research, interviews and participant› observation. Broadway, Nottingham’s art-house multiplex cinema, opened in 1990 and is known for its exhibition of cult, art and international film, although it also shows a wide range of current releases. Broadway also houses a popular Cafe-bar, film-makers and other small creative industries and a dedicated Education Department. It is a place not only of cinema-going but also of socialising, working and education. Education is sometimes understood as specific to what takes place in educational institutions and is sometimes understood as broad cultural and political processes. But in order to describe what takes place at Broadway, this thesis works to develop a different conceptualisation of education - one adequate both to understanding its operation outside dedicated institutions and to capturing the way it exists as a set of specific practices. It conceptualises education as assemblages or modes, each with their own particular characteristics, shaped by and articulated with a number of other practices, institutions and domains of activity. The thesis argues that the multitude of one-off events and ongoing activities which take place at Broadway belonging to three modes of education: acquisition, perfonnance and collaboration. Education in the mode of acquisition consists, centrally, of talks and courses run by Broadway and is rooted in the practices of art-house cinema- going. Education in the mode of performance exists mainly in the film-making projects carried out be Broadway’s Education Department and is rooted in the practices both of cinema-going and publicly funded fonnal education. Education in the mode of collaboration takes place in the Education Department, in their work with MA students, and takes place in the context of the creative industries work which takes place at Broadway. The thesis discusses these modes of education in terms of their diversity -their ’economic basis’, ’repertoire of interaction’ and ’theory of knowledge’, their specificity - how they exist at particular intersections of practices and domains of activity, and their boundary - how they are distinct from the other practices in which they are embedded and constituted. The thesis works to described a set of education practices which exist between formal education and other domains of activity and argues that it is important to understand such practices because they raise questions about the place of education in general - questions regarding its dispersal across domains of life and autonomy from formal settings and its continued or diminishing importance to social organisation.

This thesis investigates in depth three case studies of families of Greek Cypriot origin, bringing up their children in London. Each family consists of three generations: grandparents, parents and children. My aim is to explain why, although the families have similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, their children have very different outcomes in terms of language maintenance or shift. My interest in this question arose through my role as teacher in the Greek community language school that all the children attend. I use a qualitative case study approach to explore the linguistic lives of the participants through semi-structured individual interviews with grandparents, parents and children. My study appreciates the complexity and uniqueness of each family and the journey of their languages over the years. I reveal the linguistic experiences of the first generation before and after they migrated from Cyprus to England, and of the second and third generations who were born and grew up in London. I analyse the factors which informed their choices with respect to abandoning their heritage code, or reviving or reinforcing it. Included in my analysis is the important effect of language ideologies on family language policies, made particularly complex by the participants’ diglossic background in which Standard Modern Greek holds more social and political power than the Cypriot dialect. Through the in-depth analysis of my participants’ accounts, the concept of ‘family language history’ emerges as an explanatory tool. This concept involves the inter-relationship between language ideologies as they are created and contested within particular socio-political circumstances, and the decisions taken by each generation about which code should be used in specific contexts within the family and the wider society. I draw on Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas about symbolic domination and the convertibility of linguistic capital into other forms of capital, and the concept of counter-hegemony, to explain how my participants negotiate the maintenance of the two varieties of their heritage language in an English-dominant society.