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This thesis study followed six MA in English Language Teaching/Applied Linguistics students as they started out on their one-year programmes at the University of Reading, UK. They came from various academic, professional and national backgrounds. One was a native speaker of English; the other five were not. The study takes an ethnographic approach in exploring how these mature students learned to meet writing requirements in this context (which were within the essayist tradition of academic literacy), both as individual case studies and as a group. The focus was on three Terml writing assignments which all students had in common. However, the research sought to contextualise first term experiences in the framework of the whole year of study. I therefore interviewed these students about their writing five times in the year, including after submission of their year-end dissertations, and contacted them again a year later for post-course insights. The study explored how they responded to pre-submission advice from tutors and their reactions to and use of summative feedback provided. It also examined assignment briefings and documentation, students' meetings with personal tutors and my interviews with module tutors, as well as feedback on outlines and on the three assignments, and the assignments themselves. Although the students were, of course, six unique individual cases, themes emerged from this study of their development as academic writers in this context. These include the influence of background (such as academic, professional, discipline, linguistic), personal characteristics (eg expectations and approach to learning), and the role of literacy brokers.

This thesis explores the experiences of students enrolled on access courses at three further education colleges in England. A mixed methods approach was used involving questionnaires, focus groups, and interviews. The study was located within the context of widening participation policy and stringent entry requirements for higher education social work programmes. Theoretical ideas relating to social reproduction, critical race, life course development and feminism were drawn upon to investigate students' education and career decision-making. Particular focus was given to key 'turning points' linked to structure and agency factors influencing the education and career choices open to students. Issues of intersectionality in these areas in terms of ethnicity, gender and class formed a central part of the investigation undertaken. The findings show that issues of social disadvantage presented additional challenges for students' progression to higher education social work programmes. Students in general were less likely to apply to or to be offered places at pre-1992 universities, and some experienced barriers in gaining access to post-1992 universities. These barriers were disproportionately evident among black minority ethnic students, but were also reinforced by what the author terms problems of 'vocational stratification'; namely, that particular vocational routes to higher education, such as 'Access to Social Work' courses, are gendered classed and raced and receive less state financial assistance than other 'care' related courses such as childminding. HE social work programmes being more difficult to access than nonvocational courses compounded these issues. Despite these obstacles, the exercise of agency was strong among students. Key 'turning points' linked to social inequalities acted as a catalyst and prime motivator for students pursuing their education and career desires, and in wanting to make a contribution to people, and to society.

The studio critique (crit) is a firmly established and fiercely defended part of undergraduate art and design education, both here in the UK and in many other parts of the western world. It is an established and important part of a studiobased culture, where teachers and students can discuss, experiment with and develop ideas and concepts within a 'supportive environment.' This thesis examines the role and nature of the formative feedback received by students and given by teachers and sometimes student peers at the crit, and examines the crit's contribution to design students' current and future learning. The data in this study is collected through a series of individual interviews with design students and teachers, together with interviewed student focus groups and crit observations in three UK Institutions. This data is analysed with reference to current literature on formative assessment and feedback and student learning. The thesis premises that how effectively students learn in the critique and the understanding and benefit gained from the formative feedback they receive is not just reliant on the quality and focus of the formative feedback, but could also be affected by other factors such as the power position (Devas, 2004, Sara and Parnell, 2004), the stress factor (Pope, 2005) and what Kluger and DeNisi (1996) call the self or meta factor, where the quality of feedback interventions together with students' prior learning experience or understanding (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999) can impact on students' persona of themselves. This can affect the cognitive resources applied to the activities of the critique. The thesis identifies four main learning activities in the crit and suggests that cognitive learning is often impacted on by four main categories of perception of self. This, the thesis argues, can result in impaired or surface student learning.

This submission contains an Integrative Statement of 23 000 words (including footnotes and references) and a total of six' published items. Together, these form the basis of my application for the award of the degree of PhD by publication. The Integrative Statement attempts to show the coherence of my published work and demonstrates my deep and synoptic'2 understanding of my chosen field. I argue that my work has made a significant contribution to a sector of education that has both been neglected and prone to serial and sometimes disarticulated reforms. I also contend that it is a sector that has generated a dominant discourse of quality improvement through strategies encompassing such elements as competition between institutions (ostensibly driving up standards), stronger regulation and control, and an overarching emphasis on the `auditable'. In such circumstances, there has been a notable neglect of any purposeful focus on the manner in which professionalism may be enhanced, to the benefit both of teachers and their learners. Such professionalism as may derive from collective ways of working and from an engagement with the notion of the 'learning professional' has largely been absent from the policy discourse, at both national and institutional levels. The potential of mentoring to play a central role in a professionalising strategy has been a particular concern for me. The specific and distinctive contribution I claim to have made is in the form of my examination of the ways in which mentoring as a supportive activity for teachers may not only significantly aid in professional formation and the improvement of teaching quality, but also thereby assist in the national policy goal of raising standards of learner achievement. The focus in much of my published work has been on mentors' individual motivation, attributes and skills, broadening out in one particular article to an analysis of institutional factors that appear to have a strong influence on the environment in which mentoring may take place. The content and focus of the items being submitted is thus essentially concerned with professional learning and development, in particular when supported by skilled mentoring within environments that are appropriately resourced and where their 'architecture' and ethos meshes productively with the nature of effective mentoring. Even more broadly, two published items being submitted explore aspects of professional learning. I use the medium of the Integrative Statement to draw out some explicit links between these and the professional challenges being faced by practitioners in the post-compulsory sector. I also in my statement relate important elements of my own writing to a range of relevant literature, demonstrating my engagement with and understanding of perspectives from this literature.

This thesis investigates how internationally located distance learning students allocate their time, and in particular seeks to establish whether an optimum time for study exists and the factors that influence this. It examines mature students working in the real estate and construction sectors studying for a postgraduate qualification that enables career progression to membership of a professional institution. It confirms that time use is individual and that, while average times exist, there are no average students or cohesive groups that conform to a central tendency. Through following an inductive approach the research argues for the definition of a standard student as one whose time use preferences for integrating study into their working week fit within a range of hours. The conclusion proposes that the range of hours and variation in the opportunity cost of study set boundaries for a temporal zone within which the standard student is found; and which differentiates these from non-standard students whose constraints place them at the extremes of time use. The research used a 24-hour pre-coded diary, integrated into a learning activity, and kept by students for seven days. The diary recorded time during a module at the start of the students' first year, and was supplemented by pre and post questionnaires. Changing patterns in time use were identified through a follow-up longitudinal survey conducted over the succeeding eight months. The initial data analysis used quantitative methods to summarise the data that provided a general portrait of time use, but also demonstrated the limitations of conventional statistics in illuminating and developing satisfactory explanation for human behaviour. In consequence a more qualitative analysis was undertaken using both aggregate and disaggregate techniques developed within time use practice to explore the issues and factors. The thesis identifies the principal factors affecting time use and discusses these with reference to relevant research and other literature, and to associations that are apparent from the time use analysis. The complexities of time use are recognised and discussed in relation to zero sum time accounting, time management and both microeconomic and rational choice theories. The thesis concludes by proposing how the concept of a temporal zone can be used to help standard and non-standard students manage their time by designing study as layers within bands of time.

This study intensely investigated Korean university students' attitudes to a Face-to-Face Interview (FTFI) and a Computer Administered Oral Test (CAOT) first and then their performance on the tests, and finally their effects on performance on the two tests in a Korean university context. The 42 university students participating in the study took part in both the FTFI and the CAOT. After these tests, they completed a questionnaire about their attitudes towards and their perceptions of the tests. Ten of them were interviewed after the questionnaire to understand more deeply their attitudes and performance. Their performance on the two tests was examined using Multi-Faceted Rasch Analysis. The results of this study indicated that Korean university students showed much more favorable attitudes to the CAOT compared with previous studies on direct and semidirect tests, but they still preferred the FTFI to the CAOT in spite of significant negative attitudes to the FTFI with respect to aspects such as nervousness, preparation time, and tiredness. In terms of performance, Korean university students generally had low speaking abilities, but their speaking ability could still be discriminated well by the Rasch model. Their performance was assumed to be affected by many other intervening factors, but the findings suggested that their performance was not influenced by factors such as test order, bias between raters and test formats, computer familiarity, gender or age differences; however, there was an effect for the severity between raters. The students preferred the FTFI overall, but the study also showed that the FTFI was more difficult than the CAOT, indicating a test format effect on performance. Finally, the results of the analyses using the ability estimates and compensating for rater severity indicate that the students' attitudes about the FTFI were associated with their performance on the FTFI, while there was no relationship between their attitudes to the CAOT and performance on the CAOT. The students performed better on the FTFI when they had more positive and less negative attitudes toward the FTFI. That is, this study indicates that Korean university students' attitudes to the FTFI could be important sources of construct irrelevant variance on their speaking test performance on the FTFI. Based on all the findings of this study, I conclude that the use of the CAOT should be considered by teachers and administrators in Korea. The CAOT may be useful for the assessment of achievement during or at the end of the course, or as an alternative test method, in the situation where it is needed to test students' overall oral ability, but hard to conduct the FTFI, especially due to its impracticality (e.g., the lack of skillful teachers and a large number of students).

Why do some Access to Higher Education (HE) students embrace Critical Pedagogy (CP) whilst others resist? I have considered this question throughout my time on the Doctoral (EdD) programme and it has been at the heart of my academic work. Drawing on themes that have emerged during this time, including work undertaken in my Institution Focused Study (IFS), my professional concern is that, increasingly, attempts to operationalise CP in the classroom either misfire or fail - a pedagogical stalling. My experience is that students frequently misunderstand, resist or are ambivalent towards my critical intentions. I am concerned that critical pedagogues may under-theorise the contingent nature of classroom life and individual subjectivity. Whilst feminist and feminist poststructuralist writers acknowledge the situated and contingent nature of learners' subjectivity and deconstruct the nature of oppression and extent of teachers' agency to pursue CP, it remains largely a political project, abstracted from the daily realities of classroom life. Neo-liberal educational discourses increasingly undermine critical approaches and are sometimes experienced as superfluous and anachronistic by students. Given these difficulties the purpose of this thesis is to develop a more nuanced understanding of students' pedagogical perceptions. Drawing on ethnographic and collaborative research approaches, I explore narrative accounts of Access students progressing from Further Education (FE) to Higher Education (HE). Using unstructured conversations and the Voice Centred Relational (VCR) method of analysis, I problematise misperceptions concerning my critical intentions. The students' narratives are developed as three distinct themes and acknowledge constraints concerning student subjectivity. The study concludes by arguing that critical pedagogues should pay greater attention to the relational conditions from which students speak. I consider what a more contextually informed pedagogy might look like: one that acknowledges the real constraints of student subjectivity, the nature of oppression and the demands of neo-liberal policy-drivers. Finally, I suggest an alternative and more nuanced approach to CP offers a more situated and contingent way forward.

The thesis presents the findings from professionally based research. The first aim of the research was to investigate the value that learners in the post-compulsory sector placed on the different dimensions of learning articulated by Illeris (2007). These are the social dimension oflearning, the emotional dimension oflearning and the content dimension of learning. The second aim of the research was to explore how different participants might give different value to different dimensions oflearning. Three hundred and thirty one participants in four sixth form settings completed a questionnaire. The items for the questionnaire were designed to be interpreted individually and psychometrically. The data was subjected to quantitative analysis. Descriptive statistics indicated that post-compulsory learners do value the dimensions of learning proposed by Illeris (2007). However, a Principal Component Analysis suggested that they were also cognisant of a fourth dimension, that of meta-learning. The findings indicated that young post-compulsory students do not value different dimensions oflearning equally or consistently. There is a relationship between the types of learning experiences that young people have and the importance they place on different constituents of learning. Three variables are associated with the different value given to the dimensions of learning. These are the context in which the participants learn, the assessment procedures that their programmes require and prior learning achievements. The emergent findings are utilised to explore further the model offered by Illeris (2007). It is expanded to explicitly include the process of meta-learning. It is proposed that as young people engage in the post-compulsory sector, the experiences of learning that they have interact with their self identities as learners. It is suggested that these interactions lead to young people's learning identities developing differently. The implications of this for professionals working with young people in the post-compulsory sector are discussed.

The development of written literacy has been a major concern of educators and language scholars throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Theoretical discussions and empirical investigations of language acquisition, development, and use have contributed to an increasing understanding of writing as emerging from a network of interrelationships among context, task, text, language, and cognition. In my first chapter, I look at some of this work of recent years which elaborates upon these interrelationships within a general view of writing as a cognitive act emerging from varied layers of contextualizing influences. What this work reveals is the need for extensive empirical investigations into the nature of these contextualizing influences in order to understand more fully the shaping power of these interrelationships. In view of this need, this study sets out upon a context-based investigation of the writing of sixth formers in six different A-level subjects in order to see how writing emerges from the classroom (and wider) contexts. The task of the next two chapters is to present the empirical data base for the ensuing analysis of classroom language environments. Chapter two elucidates the setting up and carrying out of the investigation, explaining the most critical decisions involved in designing the study, describing the strategy for laying out the ethnographic material accumulated during the period of research, and introducing the teachers and students involved in the research. Chapter three offers six views of writing in A-level classrooms, in the form of contextualized vignettes which try to evoke the language atmospheres of the respective classrooms. These vignettes examine the nature of knowledge which is drawn upon in assigned writing, how students are enabled to transform this knowledge into written text, and how particular written texts relate to the writing registers and conventions generally expected in each discipline. The A-level examination system is shown to be a major contextualizing factor in shaping students' acid teachers' perceptions of the nature of writing which is most appropriate for engaging with the evidence of the six different disciplines. The fourth chapter synthesizes and comments upon the 'thick description' of writing in the six A-level classrooms. In so doing, it proposes an account of the relations between knowledge and composing within the classroom context, showing how different writing tasks bear differently upon levels of knowing in ways which may be characteristic of particular subject areas. It further shows writing to be, for both students and teachers, the site of competing claims upon this knowledge, in terms of demonstrating or extending it. Within these claims, the six teachers converge upon one major aim, somewhat differently conceived and executed within each subject area, of enabling their students to compose "lucid argument" in response to particular topics. It is this enabling process, the range and sensitivity of strategies which teachers develop in order to help their students transform information, knowledge, and understanding to written text, which chapter four identifies as the key contextualizing influence in shaping the writing of the students in these six classrooms. Chapter five takes a thorough analytical look at these enabling strategies, at how and why they are presented in the classroom, at how they are interpreted and taken on board by the students, and at how they are manifested in written text. This chapter is the focal point of the study, drawing upon the theoretical and empirical work discussed in the first chapter in order to explore some of the implications of these strategies in relation to the view of writing as emerging from a network of interrelationships among context, task, text, language, and cognition which informs this investigation. It chapter six, I show how looking at writing in context opens the door to a complexity of issues about the composing of written text. The data reveal writing in its educational context to be the site of conflicting aims which position both teachers and students in serious dilemmas. It is in the reconciliation of these dilemmas that the findings of the study and the implications of these findings have value.