This study investigates students’ construction of the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom, that is, ESP teaching and learning, and uses the Participatory Design (PD) approach to the design of educational technology as a means to improve and refine our understanding of their construction of the classroom. The study was carried out with Brazilian university students on a Computer Science course. Following general guidelines of the PD approach, the researcher invited an ESP teacher, a number of students, and a Software Engineer to collaboratively design a Web Portal to support ESP teaching and learning. The research questions were: (i) how do students construct the ESP classroom? and (ii) to what extent does students´ involvement in the process of designing educational technology for ESP bring to light different elements of this construction? Data were collected in two phases. Firstly, an initial interview was carried out and then records of students´ participation in the workshops, their entries in an online diary and a final interview were collected. A bottom up approach was adopted to categorisation of the beliefs constituting the students’ construction of the classroom, and the analytical framework outlined by Benson and Lor (1999) was used to help to interpret and group these classifications. The final model of the students’ construction identified four groups of beliefs, clustered around the ideas of accumulation, communication, autonomy and unease with what the ESP course offered. The use of Participative Design as a method to facilitate the collection of data about the students’ construction of the classroom was found to be effective in enabling the research to move from an description based on students’ de-contextualised descriptions of the classroom in the initial interviews, to a more articulated and detailed level of description that emerged from involvement with the design task.

This study has investigated the search options and features teachers use and prefer to have, when personalising their online search for teaching resources. This study focused on making web searching easier for UK teacher practitioners at primary, secondary and post-compulsory levels. In this study, a triangulated mixed method approach was carried out in a two phase iterative case study involving 75 teacher practitioners working in the UK educational setting. In this case study, a sequential evidence gathering method called ‘System Development Life Cycle’ (SDLC) was adapted linking findings obtained from the structured questionnaires, observations and semi-structured interviews in order to design, develop and test two versions of an experimental search tool called “PoSTech!”. This research has contributed to knowledge by offering a model of teachers’ web information needs and search behaviour. In this model twelve search options and features mostly used by teachers when personalising their search for finding online teaching resources via the revised search tool are listed, in order of popularity. A search options is selected by the teacher and features is the characteristic of an option teachers experiences. For example, search options 'Subject', ‘Age Group’, ‘Resource Type’, ‘Free and/ Paid resources’, ‘Search results language’, and search features that ‘Store search options selected by individual teachers and their returned results’. Teachers’ model of web information needs and search behaviour could be used by the Government, teacher trainers and search engine designers to gain an insight into the information needs and search behaviours of teachers when searching for online teaching resources by means of tackling technical barriers faced by teachers, when using the internet. In conclusion, the research work presented in this thesis has provided the initial and important steps towards understanding the web searching information needs and search behaviours of individual teachers, working in the UK educational setting.

This thesis offers an in-depth analysis of conceptual, methodological, and policy issues in the implementation of children's participation rights. The way in which children's participation is understood and operationalised within and across services affecting children is a related area for study. The thesis explores the varied emphases given to children's participation rights (and multi-agency working) within and across play, educational, health, welfare and out-ofschool services; and it examines and discusses conceptual, policy and practice issues in the implementation of children's participation rights within and across these services. The example of the development of an out-of-school centre known as "A Space" is then used to provide a detailed analysis of the progress and process of participative and multi-agency working. Both the A Space exemplar and the wider public policy context within which it is located are viewed as forms of 'data' -and it is these two forms of data which are considered together. The thesis suggests that whilst it seems possible to make some progress towards implementing some elements of children's participation considerable barriers exist. These barriers include the tensions which exist between the interests of children and of adults; the constraints of public policy agendas, socio-economic considerations, and the kinds of welfarist and developmentalist understandings of children and childhood which underpin the approaches of children's service agencies and the perspectives of the staff therein. It concludes that if the implementation of children's participation is to be anything more than a 'token' exercise then ways will need to be found to overcome these barriers.

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The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries has traditionally been regarded as a scholarly group which dissolved due to attrition and perhaps the suspicion of the ruling administration. A 1614 effort to recongregate failed due to James I's unfounded suspicions of the members' political intentions. This interpretation rests on the assumption that the discourses produced by members were the object of the Society, and that the members were primarily scholars. While the discourses required extensive research, they were superficial and uncritical, not representative of the standard of historical work of which some of the members, such as Camden, Stow and Lambarde, were capable. They did not justify in themselves either the amount of time which must have been expended on them, or the secrecy which the Society maintained. Close examination of the members' professional and patronage-related activities shows that they were not scholars, but highly placed and very busy functionaries of the central administration. They had politically powerful patrons, were drawn from all points on the political and religious spectrum, and had official duties throughout the country. Careful probing of their activities suggests that their political motive was to establish and prepare the ground for a widely acceptable successor to Elizabeth I. James' suspicions were soundly based on fact. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

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Etudié principalement pour ses travaux en phonologie, John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) occupe une place clé en linguistique anglo-saxonne. Il est un représentant éminent des études philologiques qui ont prévalu jusqu’au début du XXᵉ siècle, par sa culture du passé et son attachement à l’histoire des langues etdes sciences, qui font écho à sa formation d’historien. Paradoxalement, il a orienté ces savoirs et expériences vers l’avenir, en donnant une nouvelle impulsion aux sciences du langage en Grande-Bretagne,avec l’avènement de la linguistique en tant que discipline académique. Ses écrits dénotent un horizon de rétrospection très riche dans le temps et dans l’espace. Il s’y inscrit dans la continuité des expérimentations phonétiques du XIXᵉ siècle (Sweet, Bell). Ces références participent à la constitution de ce que l’on nomme la « linguistique firthienne », dont l’objet de la présente thèse est précisément d’étudier les contours. Ses concepts linguistiques (contexte de situation, sens par collocation, colligation ou langue restreinte) et phonologiques (phonesthésie, analyse prosodique) sont étudiés et mis en perspective au fil de cette thèse. Ils s’appuient sur le fonctionnalisme et la transdisciplinarité dans une approche plurilingue où les langues asiatiques jouent un rôle majeur pour la prise de conscience d’un eurocentrisme que l’auteur a cherché à dépasser. Firth est le fondateur de la London School, l’initiateur d’un héritage porté par plusieurs générations de linguistes anglo-saxons (Robins, Halliday, Crystal). Notre étude se donne pour but d’évaluer quelles ont été sa place et sa contribution réelles dans l’histoire des idées linguistiques. / Mainly studied for his work in phonology, John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) played an outstanding role in English linguistics. He stands in line with the philological studies that prevailed up until the beginning of the 20th century through his culture of the past and his commitment to the history of languages and of sciences, both echoing his academic education in history. However, he turned these knowledge and experiences towards the future, giving a new impetus to language sciences in Great Britain and eventually leading to the recognition of general linguistics as an independent academic discipline. His writings show a wide retrospective horizon both in time and space. He defined himself as in continuity with 19thcentury phonological experiments (Sweet, Bell). These references contribute to the formation of what is known as “Firthian linguistics”, whose contours this dissertation aims at defining. His linguistic and phonological concepts (context of situation, meaning by collocation, colligation, restricted languages as well as phonaesthesia and prosodic analysis) are studied here and put into perspective. They rely on functionalism and transdisciplinarity in a multilingual approach where Asiatic languages foster the awareness of a eurocentrism the author tried to overcome. Firth was the founder of the London School,initiating a legacy embodied by many generations of English linguists (Robins, Halliday, Crystal). Our study aims thus at assessing his real place and contribution to the history of linguistic thought.