The recruitment and recognition of prior informal experience in the pedagogy of two university courses in labour law

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis explores the epistemological complexities associated with the long-standing principle in adult education that the experience of the adult student should be valued, taken account of and built upon in the pedagogic process, to the extent that it can even be 'recognized' for purposes of access or credit. It asks how prior experience is recruited and recognized in a higher education context where commitment to the adult student is espoused but the curriculum is non-negotiable . Multiple research methods are used to pursue this question in two courses in Labour Law at separate universities . One, a certificate course, had admitted students with Grade 10 or less. The other, a post-graduate diploma, had admitted students without degrees. The thesis opens with a discussion of the ways in which formal and informal knowledge have been constructed in various theories of knowledge and thought, as well as in discourses on the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). Thereafter, drawing on Bernstein, Dowling and Bourdieu , and in dialogue with the empirical data, a language of localizing and generalizing strategies is developed to identify various forms of informal and formal knowledge and to describe their interplay. The range and interrelationships of these strategies is shown in the form of semantic networks. Attention is paid to the structure of law and its sub-field labour law as fields of practice and of study and it is noted that both are characterized by a deductive relationship between formal and informal knowledge. The practice of law is essentially about the application of rules, concepts and principles to actual events (a deductive process) while the development of laws themselves is in response to social conditions (an inductive process). There is always the potential for inequity between the generality of the law and the particularities of an individual case. The courses differ in the extent to which they follow the deductive logic of the practice of law. It is argued that the higher level course which explores the complexities of labour law and its application to actual reported cases and events, is closer to that logic than the lower level course which presents the law in terms of sets of rules and procedures and tries to simplify its application by the use of the hypothetical. The postgraduate course also offers students an opportunity to recruit prior experience in assignments, even though it has to be researched and recontextualized for the purpose. The research finds that both lecturers and students use localizing strategies, including the recruitment of prior personal experience. Three different pedagogic styles are identified, with the recruitment and recognition of prior informal experience as a major feature of variation . The lecturers' localizations have a generalizing trajectory in that they are expressed in relation to general rules, principles or concepts or case law. The localizations of students who have mastered or submitted themselves to the recognition and realization rules of the courses have a similar trajectory. A few students show a localizing trajectory, limited to personalizing strategies often used to challenge the general rule by asserting the particularity and difference of personal experience. These localizing orientations are associated with very limited formal education but not exclusively so. They are also associated with expectations that prior informal experience is valuable in a formal educational context and will be recognized. This promise, engendered by discourses on RPL and adult education, obfuscates the transmission/acquisition purposes of a formal education programme. The theoretical contribution of the thesis lies with the language of description which it develops to analyse the interplay between the multiple dimensions of formal and informal knowledge. The research also has important implications for two theories of Basil Bernstein's. It shows that it is difficult to identify horizontal discourse empirically and to separate it from vertical discourse. The two are inextricably intertwined. The discussion of students' orientation to the local and the general shows the relevance of Bernstein's notions of elaborated and restricted codes to adult education. At the same time it exposes the crudity of these notions, showing, through fine-tuned analysis, the multiple different ways in which context-dependent and -independent knowledge is combined in practice. Finally, the research shows that students with limited formal education can and do succeed in formal education programmes. Factors influencing their achievement include the nature of their work experience and the extent to which it has exposed them to formal literacies, and dispositional factors including a willingness to accept pedagogic hierarchy, to assume an individual rather than collective identity and to expend symbolic labour

The effect of teaching second language students a combination of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for reading and listening comprehension

Students who study through the medium of a second language often have reading/listening comprehension and general study problems. This study focuses on particular aspects of these problems only, namely, identification of main ideas, summarisation and note-taking. The aim of this study was w determine the effect of teaching L2 students a combination of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for reading and listening comprehension (the main idea, summarising and note-taking by means of dictation). An intervention programme was designed in order to teach students these skills. There were ten students in both the experimental and the control groups. Both groups were assessed before and after the intervention programme. The findings reveal that the intervention was successful, with the experimental group showing greater improvement than the control group. The findings of this study have implications for second language tertiary learning and teaching theory and practiceLinguistics and Modern LanguagesM.A. (Linguistics

Andragogical listening in business education in Zimbabwe : a study in tertiary didactics

Listening for learning during lectures has been established to be a staged process. Listening's role during didactic andragogical events in the Bulawayo Polyte9hnic Business Studies Department's Business Communication lectures was investigated. Both the qualitative and the quantitative data gathered contributed to a statistical groundstructure and an ethnomethodological outline, which together combined into a balanced description of the listened learning .p rocess in that tertiary learning environment. Data sources included student and lecturer responses as well as observed learning during communicativeness skills development, and whilst learning in lectures and tutorials. The related literature was supported by the study's findings, confirming that individuals perceive, interpret and evaluate information directly in accordancewith their own lifeworld. This includes own learned technique which derives from inherent oral or literate culture base as well as from personal cameral preferences and endowments. The consequent individually different listened learning range constitutes a conventional normal dispersion.Educational StudiesM. Ed. (Didactics

A proactive chatbot framework designed to assist students based on the PS2CLH model

Nowadays, universities are using new technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning and to assist students to enhance their academic performance. In fact, for decades, new ways to convey the information required to teach and support students have slowly been integrated into education. This development started decades ago with the popularity of e-mails and the Web. A review of relevant literature revealed that learning requires more innovative and efficient technologies to cope with natural learning challenges, highlighting a need for more effective tools to establish the interaction between humans and machines, lecturers and students. In addition, the covid pandemic presented additional new challenges for the collaboration/interaction of lecturers and students at universities. This situation led to a great demand for such tools. Researchers have been trying to develop such tools for decades, and have made good progress, but they are still in their infancy. There has been a significant evolution in computer hardware in the last decade, leading to advances in AI machine learning and Deep Learning which have made tools such as chatbots more usable. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of the chatbot are still insufficient to meet many educational needs. According to our investigation, current chatbots are mainly based on subject knowledge and therefore assist users with answers which take no consideration of their personal circumstances, which is essential in education. This research aims to design a proactive chatbot framework to assist students. The new chatbot framework integrates students’ learning profiles and subject knowledge, making the chatbot more intelligent to improve student learning and interaction more effectively. The research consists of two main parts. The first part seeks to determine the most effective students’ learning profiles on the basis of the controllable academic factors which affect their performance. The second part develops a chatbot framework to which students’ learning profiles will be applied. Due to the different nature of these two endeavours, a hybrid methodology was used in this research. The literature on learners’ characteristics and the academic factors that affect their performance was reviewed in depth, and this formed the basis for developing a new PS2CLH (psychology, self-responsibility, sociology, communication, learning and health & wellbeing) model on which an individual’s web profile can be built. The PS2CLH model combines the perspectives of psychology, self-responsibility, sociology, communication, learning and health & wellbeing to build a student-controllable learning factor model. This study identifies the impact of students’ controllable factors on their achievement. It was found that the model was 94% accurate. In addition, this research raised participant students’ awareness of PS2CLH perspectives, which helped learners and educators to manage the factors affecting academic performance more effectively. A comprehensive investigation, including a survey, showed that the chatbot supported by AI technology performed better and more efficiently in various assistant situations, including education. However, there is still room for improvement in the effectiveness of the education chatbot. Therefore, the research proposes a new chatbot framework assistant which will integrate students’ learning profiles and develop components to improve student interaction. The new framework uses knowledge from the PS2CLH model AI - Deep Learning to build a proactive chatbot for assisting students’ learning of their academic subjects and their controllable factors that affects students’ performance. One of the principal novelties of the chatbot framework lies in the communication facilitator between student-lecturer/assistant. The proactive chatbot applies multimodality to the students’ learning process to retain their attention and explain the content in different ways using text, image, video and audio to assist the students and improve their learning experience effectively. Furthermore, the chatbot proactively suggests new controllable factors for students to work on, including related factors that influence their academic performance. Tests of the framework showed that the proactive chatbot demonstrated better question response accuracy than the current BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) chatbot and presented a more effective learning method for students

An Exploration of Reading Comprehension Challenges in Saudi Arabian University EFL Students

Abstract: This is an interpretive study, framed by sociocultural theory, and employing qualitative data collection methods to explore the nature of reading comprehension challenges faced by English as Foreign Language learners. These challenges were identified through analysis of the students' reading aloud processes, and the factors to which students attributed these challenges were investigated from the perspectives of both the readers themselves and those of their lecturers. Information about student reading aloud processes was obtained through participation in the Think Aloud Protocol by sixteen student volunteers from three universities in Saudi Arabia. Nine students then volunteered to reflect on their reading aloud processes in the follow-up Retrospective Verbal Report. All sixteen students then took part in a semi-structured interview in which they were questioned about the factors influencing their reading challenges. Six of their lecturers also volunteered to undertake a similar interview process with regard to their student's reading of English. The findings showed that Saudi EFL students exhibited a number of reading processes which interfered with comprehension. They paid little attention to punctuation, and used ineffective reading strategies such as repetition and guessing, which were usually incorrect. Words were often incorrectly decoded and therefore, mispronounced, particularly vowels which were pronounced by their alphabetic names rather than phonically, and words were substituted for those which were graphically or phonologically similar, indicating a failure to monitor comprehension. Students also read slowly which interfered with the development of coherency, fluency and comprehension. A number of themes were identified with regard to the source of these challenges. These themes relate to the social and cultural framework surrounding the student, including a cohesive, authoritarian society with a strong social tradition and a culture which does not value or prioritise reading for pleasure. Participants believed that these social and cultural forces lead to a lack of resources, poor access to English, poor teaching methods and a lack of background knowledge as they read. They claimed that this generated states of mind which contributed to their reluctance, and largely negative attitudes towards, reading in English. In particular, participants reported that the social demands of their culture, the failure to teach good phonic skills, and of negative mental and emotional states, influenced their reading fluency and contributed to their reading comprehension challenges. The unique approach and design of this study, particularly in the context of the Arab world, has produced findings which demonstrate the relevance and influence of social and cultural factors on reading processes and comprehension challenges. These findings have led to a number of recommendations for the learning and teaching of English reading in international contexts. The study concludes by suggesting that these processes and factors be further investigated by future studies

Investigating reading for academic purposes: sentence, text and multiple texts

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of BedfordshireThis study examines the nature of reading in academic environments and suggests ways for a more appropriate assessment of it. Research studies show that reading in academic settings is a complex knowledge management process in which information is selected, combined and organised from not a single, isolated text but from multiple information sources. This study initially gathered evidence from students studying at a British university on their perceived and observed reading purposes and processes in three studies; a large scale questionnaire, longitudinal reading diary study and finally individual interviews in order both to establish whether the prominent reading skills used by them were as put forth in the studies on academic reading, and to examine in detail the actual cognitive processes (reading operations) used in reading for academic purposes. The study draws on the reading theories that explain reading comprehension and focuses specifically on different levels of careful reading such as sentence, text and multiple texts in order to explicate that increasingly more complex cognitive processes explain higher levels of reading comprehension. Building on the findings from the three initial studies, it is suggested that reading tests of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) should involve not only local level comprehension questions but also reading tasks at text and multiple texts levels. For this aim, taking the Khalifa and Weir (2009) framework as the basis, cognitive processes extracted from the theories defining each level of reading, and contextual features extracted through the analysis of university course books were combined to form the test specifications for each level of careful reading and sample tests assessing careful reading at sentence, text and intertextuallevels were designed. Statistical findings confirmed the differential nature of the three levels of careful reading; however, the expected difficulty continuum could not be observed among the tests. Possible reasons underlying this are discussed, suggestions on reading tasks that might operationalise text level reading more efficiently and intertextual level reading more extensively are made and additional components of intertextual reading are offered for the Khalifa and Weir (2009) reading framework. The implications of the findings for the teaching and assessment of English for Academic Purposes are also discussed

Enhancing the study reading skills of distance education students : strategies for designing course material

D. Ed. (Didactics