My aim is to find out about teachers? perceptions of methods concerning learning and assessment of oral proficiencies. My questions are: What perceptions are there among teachers concerning assessment of oral proficiencies? How do teachers describe their ways of promoting and assessing oral proficiency? In order to answer my questions and obtain data I have accomplished two focus groups interviews with seven language teachers. The result shows that teachers are concerned with several factors regarding assessment of oral proficiency.

Personal assistants ' descriptions of their own professional role are usually removed for the benefit of users ' description of the profession. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the assistants perceive their profession by providing assistants a possibility to talk about their experiences of the profession. Data has been collected by twelve interviews with active working personal assistants aged 22-57 years. Assistants interviewed have different experiences and working with people with various disabilities. The method used is a qualitative method with a narrative analysis method, where the twelve interviews have been merged into four fictional stories.

Purpose: The primary aim of the study was to analyse and discuss how employees with a secondary nursing education describe their occupational character whilst working as well as the conditions for caring acts in a changing progress towards professionalism.Questions: What are the conditions to provide a high standard of care in this changing progress? What influence does it have on the occupational character ?Method: Critical case study and focus groupsConclusion: One of the central findings of the field study was the identification of two occupational identities; traditional and pedagogical orientated. These two occupational character traits are connected with different types of occupational competence and demands different theoretical knowledge. They also have different regards concerning the new title; social omsorgsassistent. A conclusion of the study is that a professional project of a non-specific nature is unable to stress the different levels of knowledge and competence that occupational identities have when one seeking professionalism..

At the centre of this study lies the question if normative gender thinking affects the way poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written, this in relation to both the gender of the reviewer and the poet. The study crosses three academic fields; gender studies, poetry and journalism, and is based on the cultural studies theory of media affecting and even creating the world around it.The study is based on two types of analysis. One quantitative analysis based on the thematic criticism theory about detail studies that shows bigger patterns, this analysis focuses on how the poet and his/hers work are being treated in the reviews in areas such as how much space they´re given in the newspapers, how they are named by the reviewer and the tendency to quote the reviewed work.  And one qualitative analysis based on the new criticism method of close reading, that focuses on the reviewers way of writing and how that may be connected with theories of gender differences, this both connected to the gender of the reviewers and the poets.The material chosen for this study are all the reviews that were published in the same newspapers and that reviewed two specific poetry works by two specific poets chosen with great sensibility to age and career so that their difference in gender would be the most significant difference between them. The works were chosen based on year of publishing, they were supposed to be published as newly as possible and as close to each other in time as possible.

The goal with this master thesis has been to evaluate and to examine the stationary resistance bridge. The resistance bridge uses a 4-point measuring to determinate the resistance, which is used in the manufacturing of the conductor. It is then used when the resistance is to be decided for coarser aluminium conductors. A conductor has to fulfil certain demands to be able to move forward in the process. One of these demands is the resistance in ohm/km, which has demands that the measure values of the resistance bridge are as true and precise as possible.

För ett serviceföretag är det väsentligt att kunna leverera tjänstekvalitet för att tillfredsställa kunden. Tjänsternas immateriella produktkaraktär gör det emellertid svårt för serviceleverantören i allmänhet och professionella tjänsteleverantörer i synnerhet att säkerställa kvalitet. Syftet med detta arbete är att utveckla en kontrollmodell som kan användas av professionella tjänsteleverantörer som ett hjälpmedel i arbetet att säkra servicekvalitet. Modellen bygger på relevant teori och består av tre kvalitetskategorier ? image, teknisk kvalitet och funktionell kvalitet ? genom vilka 13 kvalitetsdimensioner behandlas.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how board structure influences CEO compensation for companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2004. The theoretical frame of reference is based upon the corporate governance theory, the principal-agent theory and previous empirical research in the area. A cross sectional regression analysis is used, where a number of control variables are included and significance tests are conducted. The study is based on information regarding CEO compensation, and possible factors affecting the compensation, from 267 companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange A- and O-list in the year 2004. We find that the board structure has no significant effect on the CEO compensation.

The purpose of this study is to examine how educationalists work with bilingual children's language by looking at how and what approaches are used to encourage language development. I have chosen to compare two educational philosophies: Montessori and Outdoor Education, to see how big the differences / similarities are in working methods. The background to this study is that preschools uses various approaches and have different methods to stimulate the children. This means that the conditions for children's language development might look different depending on the preschool they go to. The information used has been gathered through interviews, where I have taken note of educationalists thoughts on their working methods, and through professional literature dealing with this topic.

This report contains a programming improvement work in a LabVIEW? fire testing furnace control system for SP Fire Technology in Borås. Here materials and products behaviour are tested and evaluated, being exposed to fire. For this task, UGNET is being used for control and surveillance of the testing furnace system. System hardware has been updated gradually through the years, while the software has been neglected.

The task in this thesis is the steering of one of Saab Bofors Dynamics robots using Sliding Mode Control, a method they never used before. The robot constitutes a system which in addition to perturbations and uncertainties due to modeling imprecision, hold the difficulty of being highly time variant. In order to be able to keep required performance with uncertainties and modeling imprecision present, the use of robust control methods like Sliding Mode Control is necessary. SMC is based on the states of the system being forced to stay on or in the direct vicinity of a hyper plane in the state space which is chosen in a way that gives the system dynamics desired properties. Other advantages with sliding mode are reduced order dynamics on the switching surface and total insensitivity to some uncertainties and perturbations.

Blood-borne infectious diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) spread when the addicts share needles and injecting equipmentwithin contact networks. A quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted in Winnipeg,Canada in December 2003 - September 2004. Through a special questionnaire, respondentswere asked to answer questions about themselves and about their contacts, about relationshipsand how they shared syringes and other injection supplies. Blood tests were used to identifywhether they carried any blood-borne infectious diseases. We selected some variables from theoriginal data set.

The purpose of this project has been to redesign an already existing cook-book. The title of the book (directly translated), ?Season in food ? the year around with herbs and spices?, contains what the headline imposes: spices, herbs and food. But when the author tries to entwine these parts and communicate it to the reader it is not working all to well due to a poor and inconsistent graphic design.I have followed the theories and values of information design when I redesigned the book layout with the intent to simplify the communication between author and reader. In the progress to make a complete dummie of the book I did multiple literature studies, book analysis, tests and a vast number of drafts.In this report I will describe the whole process from start to finish.

If you have access to wood, a wood burning boiler is a cheap way to heat your home, but it is certainly not the most convenient option. Wood requires many operations and management, which takes time. One way to reduce this workload is to have a modern boiler with automatic ignition. Enertech/CTC has a desire to create an accessory with automatic ignition to a modern wood burning boiler. Today there is no boiler on the market that can ignite firewood automatically without the introduction of paper and sticks.

The theoretical background in this essay made clear that the students? knowledge about physics improve, and they express a more positive attitude towards physics as a subject, when they have access to a more laboratory-based learning style. The aim of this study is to research how the placement of the lab relative to the lecture affects the students? experiences and level of knowledge. The study involved students in year eight and was carried out during four weeks.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate an existing user interface. The company in question has a web-based user interface (available through logging in via their website), but they are interested in making the process of using the interface more convenient and the interface more accessible, so that users without a background in computing can properly manage the interface. At the same time they want to apply additional functionalities in order create and to manage increased traffic on the company?s website. For this reason it is important to take into account the issues involved in human-computer interaction (HCI) as well as aspects of cognitive psychology in order to make the tool and the web interface more usable, more motivational, and therefore more efficient and professional.