This Master's thesis examines some aspects of children's books for 9-12 year olds, and the children's books market, from a gender perspective. The main objective is to make a gender analysis of attitudes among children and other agents in the book market towards children's books of different qualities. Children's reflections on gender roles in the books and the importance of gender aspects for publishers in the field, are investigated. A combination of methods are used, including literary analyses, surveys of publication lists of the BTJ group Bibliotekstjänst interviews with children and questionnaires sent to children as well as to Swedish publishers of children's books. The analysis of children's books clearly shows that images of gender roles vary in different kinds of books which supports theories of gendered literature.

The intention of this study is to compare difficulties of Swedish pronunciation of five  second-language learners with Thai as mother tongue. Thereafter make a comparison with previous research in pronunciation difficulties in people with the same primary language to see if the deviations are similar. I used both recorded material/recordings which I analyzed as well as experiences from pronunciation training that I observed at SFI. The pronunciation difficulties were documented and entered in tables. The recordings consist of 25 Swedish words and a text performed by five informants. In my study, you can distinguish a pattern in my five informants pronunciation difficulties complying with Bannert informants who also have Thai as primary language.

This thesis is about how to criticize the large number of non-fiction for children which is published nowadays. I have noticed that both librarians and teachers do not know what perspective to apply with regard to this category of books. There are some good ones, but also a lot of bad ones and some really bad ones. The purpose of this essay is to search by means of criteria from history of art, history of literature ? principally history of children's literature ? and pedagogy, for prevalent attitudes towards non-fiction for children.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how a children's book is suggested to be prepared in order to be accepted for publication by a publishing house in Sweden today.My questions was first to clarify the concept of a "children's book". Secondly, to understand if there are any guidelines to follow regarding the design and illustration of a children´s book, and how to proceed with the best chances of getting a mauscript published.To answer the question, I have chosen to use a qualitative method containing questionnaire items involving eleven Swedish publishers of children's literature.My results show that children's books includes all literature that has an target audience of people between 0-18 years of age. The most important thing is that the book's material is appropriate to the target group's level of mental perceptions and emotional competence. The material which then is submitted to the publisher will need to be of the highest quality and the author must investigate a consistent niche in order to submit the material to a publisher..

This study is about how teachers of history at different upper secondary schools in Uppsala think and talk about the role language plays in the classroom and in education in general. In order to find this out, interviews were carried out with five teachers of history at four different upper secondary schools in Uppsala. This study has an analysis of the statements by and interviews with the teachers in a wide context by using a previous study carried out in Uppsala, which categorizes the upper secondary schools of Uppsala into a social field based upon what assets their students have. These assets are estimated by using Bourdieu?s theory of symbolic, social and cultural capital.

The purpose with this essay is to find out how active teachers think about integrate children with the diagnosis autism into the regular school. The method I have used to find out is a qualitative interview, where I have interviewed three teachers of various age and sex.A person with the diagnosis autism has problems with communication, social interaction and the ability to form a conception. Today, we do not know what causes autism, but we do know that it has to do with a neurological disorder. The word integrate means unite or join together as a wholeness. Many children who have a handicap may feel good to participate in a school where the other pupils do not have a handicap.

This report is going to discuss the relatively new and in schools, frequently debated concept of inclusion. The concept inclusion, easily explained means that all children, regardless of special needs or other conditions should be involved in the schools ordinary environment.In the democratic school of today, the education is supposed to be adapted to every individual and its special needs. The dilemma of the special need education is described as giving all children the same, but at the same time adapt to each and everyone?s differences.This study describes the teachers approach to the concept of inclusion and especially the inclusion of children in need of special support. And the teachers experience of possible advantages and disadvantages in their work to include all children.The method?s that were used to collect the empirical information to this report were qualitative interviews.The questions at issue were:How do the teachers include children in need of special support in the education?The teachers experiences of advantages and disadvantages in the way they work whit inclusionPartly for the children in need of special supportPartly for the teachersPartly for the rest of the class.

This thesis is structured as a combined empirical and literary study. The aim is to investigate how children at the age of 11-12 years reflect on their readings of fiction and how these reflections relate to the librarians' perspective of a child's reading ability and reading development. Qualitative interviews with children and librarians constitute the empirical part. Research and theories are compared to the empirical part then placed into a more extensive context. How do children at the age of 11-12 years old reflect upon their reading of fiction and how do librarians relate themselves to this age? An analysis using interviews, research and theories is used to answer these questions.

In my study I have participated at the Fifth Dimension / Active Worlds site in Villa Gymnastiken in Ronneby, where I have worked both as an assistant to the project leader and as a researcher, but also as a participant together with the children. The children are working in a virtual world called Femtedim, created in a internet-based program named Active Worlds Education Universe. The Femtedim-world are bridging together two physical worlds in Ronneby and Copenhagen. My main focus is on an intervention that occurred in the 12th of March when the research-team in Copenhagen, which runs the project in Denmark, decided to create a new challenge for the children since some of them started to get bored. They added gravitation to the Femtedim-world, which lead to a few different reactions among the children. Most of the children didn´t like it and were very hostile towards the idea that they would not be able to fly around freely in the Femtedim-world.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate Swedish as a second language acquisition in a group of students with diverse culturul backgrounds. my intension is to find out if a dialogical posture in teaching with focus on the students earlier knowledge,experianses, thoughts and feelings, will contribute to a teaching enviroment where the students can express them selves and listen to each other. the teachers task is to help the students to explore their own thinking.According to the theoretical base of the essay, sucessfull second language asquisition occours in a meaningsfull context through dialogue and interaction between students and teacher as well as between student and student.I have used a qualitative method consisting in participating as a teacher in this group of second language learners during four lessons, observing, taking notes and writing diary. The teaching material used during the lessons was a book (fiction but based on a true story) and the dialogue in the group proceeded from the story we read together..

This study aims to find more knowledge about preschool teachers? point of view on the situation of children living in economic hardship and how it affects them at the preschool. With economic hardship becoming more frequent and common amongst families with young children we find the subject important and in need of more attention. Studies have proven the negative effects of poverty on children?s development and health and since the preschool is a big part of children?s everyday life the study aims to see what perspectives practitioners have on the issue and how they plan activities and learning situations based on the needs of these children.

 In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) Saul Kripke claims that Wittgenstein argues for a certain form of scepticism in his book Philosophical Investigations (1953), namely a new form of philosophical scepticism, a result of Wittgenstein´s idea of language as language games. Nihilism, scepticism of meaning or of concept, constitutive scepticism are other commentators´ different names of the same phenomenon. The philosophy of Wittgenstein accounts for how our words, including the words of mathematics, have no meaning and there are no a priori justified objective facts as to what I mean about a word. We follow the rules blindly and without justification. We are unable to find any facts against this proposal.

The purpose of this study has been to describe and analyze how seven Swedish preschool teachers and two special education teachers think and work with children who show a lack of social skills. The study method has been semi-structured interviews with the educators which have been analyzed and sorted under different themes/categories. The theoretical framework used in this study is sociocultural, relational and categorical perspectives. These perspectives have been chosen in order to better understand how teachers see their role in supporting children in need of special support. The environment in the preschool is found to be of great help and the teachers? approach is of great importance.The research emphasizes the importance of integrating thinking, feeling and behavior.

Study aimed to see if the language has bearing on mathematics learning. The study used qualitative interviews of three first grade teachers and one special education teacher.The questions asked was:Do the teachers and specialist teacher, at the selected schools, think there is a connection between language difficulties and difficulties in mathematics and in case how is this connection.How does the teachers / specialist teacher make it easier for students to learn mathematics and swedish.The study was based on Vygotsky and Piaget teories. In previous research, it is primarily Malmer, Hoines, Lowing and Kilborn who´s been treated. Within the governing documents, it is mainly the compulsory school curriculum Lpo-94, and the curriculum for mathematics treated.I hope that the study has conclude that there is a connection between language and mathematics learning.I tried to emerged this through interviews with tree teachers and one special teatcher but i couldn´t. The teatchers couldn`t fint that it was the only reason to why the pupils hade difficulties in mathematics.But in the literature I found the relation between language- and mathematicdificulties..

This master thesis is based on the sociocultural perspective. A qualitative research study was conducted to investigate children's attitudes towards reading, texts and libraries.The theoretical background is constituted by ideas from the new sociology of childhood, literacy-studies and reader-response theory.The study was conducted with 23 children, 13 girls and 10 boys, participating in focus groups.The results of the study reveal that children's literacy-activities in school are strongly influenced and limited by adults. Children's interest in pictures and non-fiction-reading do not correspond to the school institution that favors traditional media and fiction. The study also reveals a gender division between children's literacy-activities that tends to grow with age. All the children in the study regard libraries as book-houses and wished for libraries that combine activity and serenity.The thesis shows the importance of being aware of, and engage in, children's reading-interests and reading-practices if the reading stimulating activities in schools and libraries are to be successful.