AbstractThe Swedish society has always been monolingual, but has for the past decades transformed into a multicultural and multilingual society. The aim of this study is to investigate if and in that case how preschool teachers work with language development in bilingual and multicultural preschools. The concept of linguistic and cultural diversity includes several different components, not least the social interactions that are of great importance to every individual's development, learning and participation in the world. By understanding the importance of language, language development and the role of mother tongue in second language acquisition, we look into various researches done concerning the effects of the preschool teachers? opinions, methods used to language developmental primarily for children who are multilingual and how the physical environment is shaped to promote language in multicultural and multilingual preschools.The method used in this study is semi-structured interviews with preschool teacher working in multicultural or bilingual preschool settings.

Syftet med vår undersökning är att övergripande synliggöra den dominanta roll ett barn kan ha eller få i en grupp. Vi valde att observera i två olika klasser i de lägre åldrarna på en F-6 skola. För att få syn på den dominanta rollens egenskaper så använde vi oss av bland annat videoinspelning. Videoinspelningen gav oss material som kom så nära den naturliga miljön i gruppen som möjligt. Först när vi började observera såg vi inte några av de egenskaper som vi trodde karaktäriserade den dominanta rollen.

Language impairment affects the ability to communicate. Children with languageimpairment have difficulties in using language in interaction to various degrees, and the contributions of the conversational partner are of great importance. The use of languagein interaction can be analysed by means of conversation analysis. The purpose of thepresent study was to study interaction of a group of pre-school children with language impairment with four different conversational partners. These were a peer with languag eimpairment, a peer with typical language development, a pre-school teacher and a parent.

The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

I have written an experiential essay about my role as a preschool director and the important work decisions that I face. What is best for the child? That is something that I think is important to take into consideration.In the narrative, I describe how an induction occurs at my preschool. We use an "old" tried and true method which spans two to three weeks, which I believe is best for children under the age of two. They need to first connect withone educator who they are comfortable with before they are secure enough to play and explore the environment of the preschool.In recent years, another method has emerged which is shorter and which has quickly became popular in many preschools.

Every municipality in Sweden is responsible for offering its citizens adequate childcare. Parents hand in a preliminary schedule to the preschool for when their child needs to be in childcare, and based on this the preschool staff is scheduled. Some municipalities measure the actual time a child is in childcare. The essay idea comes from when I heard that one municipality was thinking of register the children's actual time in preschools. I started thinking on how to solve such a task.

?Life on a delicate thread?Baptism and godparenting in Bottnaryd and Ulricehamn 1781-1783The aim of this study is to discover if there were differences between the baptism traditions maintained in a typical rural parish and in an urban town parish in the period 1781-1783 and to suggest possible reasons for any differences found. Baptism records from rural Bottnaryd parish and the town of Ulricehamn were studied and compared. In both communities, parents were anxious to have their child christened on the day of birth or the day after. They did not want to wait until the following Sunday, as church law prescribed. Infant mortality was high and if the child died before it was christened, it would not go to heaven.

In this essay I reflect on what makes a good preschool teacher today. I discuss the importance of education, the importance of experience and practical knowledge, but also the importance of capacity for self-reflection and listening. I bring up examples from my workplace, where some think more about their limitations than on what and how much they actually can. Others are more satisfied by what they can and see less of their limits. Some are also lack of the will to see differently and to do changes.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how the public library communicates with young users through the library web sites. Four Swedish public library web pages for children are analysed. In the analysis the web pages are treated as a combination of semiotic resources that, communicating as a whole, hold a meaning potential. In order to identify the underlying meaning of the whole I have applied the tools of Kress' & van Leeuwen's visual social semiotics to the chosen web pages.The information value, the framing and the salience of each composition is examined and analysed, as is the size of frame, the perspective and the vertical angle of a selection of images from each web page. The results of the semiotic analysis are then discussed and related to Jochumsen et al:s four space-model and the notion of ?child perspective? and ?empowerment?.The results show that the child perspective is strongest on the web pages that represent the performative space as dominating and that empowerment is mainly represented as ?doing?, ?participating? and the ?free choice?.

Title: How do music students with different genre backgrounds perceive the same music? In this paper I report a study about how music students with different genre background perceive the same music. I let twentyone classical music upper secondary school pupils and twentyone rock music upper secondary school pupils listen to ten short music pieces of different character and styles. While listening, they were asked to answer four questions about which instruments they could perceive, what they could tell about pulse, rhythm and beat in the music, which component they thought was the most important in the piece and what word they thought best described the feeling of the piece. All four questions had to be answered for each piece of music to facilitate analysis of differences connected to genre background in those answers.

Numerous studies raise the topic of highly educated immigrants whose education and list of qualifications devalue in the context of the Swedish labour market. However, little is known of those with foreign background who enter into higher education in Sweden. Our study attempts to shed some light onto the value of higher education relative to that of a person?s ethnic background. The background material features nine in-depth interviews of foreign background academics, as well as data extracted from an extensive survey study previously carried out at Växjö University. Initially, the quantitative data showed that students with foreign background, including Swedish-born children of immigrants, had not managed to find qualified work upon completion of studies to the same extent as their Swedish background counterparts.

The aim of the study was to examine the impact of the use ofTalking Mats in group conversations with preschool children. Two preschoolteachers and eight preschool children, aged 4-5, took part in one of twoconversational groups with one teacher and four children in each group. Thegroups were video-taped during four group conversations on two topics, withand without the use of Talking Mats. The amount of time for each child inthe conversation was calculated, the child?s communicative contributionswere coded and thereafter the extent to which their views were noticed wasanalyzed.

During the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century Sweden experienced social changes. The proceeding industrialization led to a process of urbanization where people were forced, more or less, in to the cities to find work. The traditional agricultural self-sufficiency society was successively replaced by salaried employment. This meant that family and home was no longer the major centre of production, nurturance and care. In order to support themselves and their families, even women applied for industrial work.

This essay contains two stories that reflect the reality I face as an educator, as well as a reflective discussion about my self-perceived dilemma. The dilemma reflects a classroom situation where I as an educator have trouble dividing my focus, my focus is either put on entire the class or on the child with special needs. Through this self-perceived situation I have started to question how children with special needs find their place in the school today. I discuss how I can handle and look at the unique situation that occurs when meeting this child.Terms like integration, inclusion, segregation, social rights and the expression "a school for everyone" will be discussed in this text, as well as how we can connect these terms and expressions to the problems I find in the school system?s way of handling children with special needs.I also highlight my dilemma from different ethical perspective.

The aim of the study was to examine the retinal ON- and OFF-pathways of the canine electroretinogram (ERG). The ON- and OFF-pathways are used to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. A dark object is discernible from a lighter background using the OFFpathway and the ON-pathway is used to descry a light object upon a darker background. This study shows that the dog ERG has both ON- and OFF-responses and that these responses can be separated by prolonging the flash duration over 50 ms. The dog OFF-response waveform was more similar to the cat OFF-response than the human OFF-response (Frishman, 2006; Zrenner and Gouras, 1979). In this study six female three-year-old Beagle dogs were included. Both background and flash stimuli were provided by LEDs (light emitting diodes) with a wavelength of 470 nm, a wavelength that is absorbed almost as effectively by the canine M/L-cones as by the S-cones. These stimuli gave ERGs with both ON- and OFF-responses.