One purpose of our study was to investigate if equality in work time and parental leave in a relationship affect the time that parents spend with their children. Our first hypothesis was that increased equality in work time and parental leave leads to a reduction of the parents? total time with their children, ie the children spend more hours in pre-school and begin pre-school earlier. In order to test our hypothesis, we investigated the relationship between the woman?s and the man?s work time and parental leave and the time that the children spend in pre-school as well as at what age they began pre-school by using two surveys.Our study showed a significant coherence between both working women?s work time and the children?s time in pre-school as well as women?s parental leave and the children?s age at start in pre-school.

According to the National Agency for Education 06-06-2010 are approximately 115 000 students graduating from Secondary School in the year of 2010.Out of these students, we know that thousands of them are hampered by reading and writing disabilities in various degrees. Have these students been given the best support needed when it comes to writing and reading?Compensation may be perceived as a goal for the pupil to catch up with the rest of the educational group or as a vehicle to go round the difficulties. In Sweden, diagnosed dyslexics are not allowed to use speech synthesis, a compensatory technical aid, during the 9th degree national tests.This study?s purpose is to discover if the usage of speech synthesis during the national test of Swedish and reading comprehension might work as a motivation booster for the students and consequently increase their test scores.This is a quantitative study including study including 15 pupils with diagnosed reading and writing disabilities.

Often places for children and youth are planned how adults think children and adolescents want them, but we are often wrong. As a result, we find empty playgrounds while our target groups are building dens in the bushes, hanging around shopping areas, and so on. This report is an attempt to create a place for young people based on the opinions of their needs and their environment to better understand how to design a place that suits them well. To gain knowledge about how it is to be young in Simrishamn, a small township in the southwest of Sweden, I interviewed children and young adolescents. The interviews were all carried out in groups, mostly in larger groups inside where the result differed a lot depending on the settings for the interview. Two walkabouts with groups of three children were also made. Most of the children were eager to participate and tell about their reality, but some preferred not to.

Reading and analyzing literature has a long tradition of being an essential part of the teaching of English in Sweden. As the offers of entertainment have increased in popular culture with the introduction of computer games, internet and other media, interest in reading novels has decreased. Literature is still a compulsory part of English teaching and the question is how teachers of today use literature and what kind of literary instruction they use.The aim of this study is to explore and discuss the literary instruction discourse in pedagogical texts, lessons, created by and for English teachers of Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. The lessons have been collected from the site lektion.se, where teachers are able to share knowledge and lessons. The study uses an analytical method based on Norman Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis in order to analyze the lessons.

The purpose of this study is to find out how teachers in preschool interact with children.By unstructured observations of teachers in preschool I intend to find out how they interact with children. Is it possible to see that the operation is built on guided interaction speciality?Positive interaction between adults and children is of importance to a good childhood and a child?s learning. I have asked myself how teachers interact with children in preschool. There are different ways of interaction.

A cochlear implant (CI) is a hearing device that makes it possible for individuals who are deaf or has a severe hearing impairment to receive auditory information and develop spoken language. The pragmatic ability may be affected. In short, pragmatics may be described as the study of language use in social contexts. Pragmatic ability can be seen as the result of the individual?s behavior as well as the underlying causes.The aim of the present study was to describe the pragmatic ability in children with CI.

Our study aims to investigate whether resilient children share common factors that could explain them not following the expected course of development for said group. The study also sets out to explore which strategies resilient children implement in order to cope with their situation.The study is based on the following questions:How do resilient children describe their experiences from growing up with parents with substance abuse problems? What risk and protective factors do they mention in their biographies?We use the system theory and Goffman's dramaturgic perspective as analytical tools.  The system theory could help us see the family as a system, while Goffman's theory might help us understand how resilient children find different strategies, and why they implement these strategies, to hide their family problems.The results show that the most important factors with a positive effect on resilient children were: to have somebody else important in their lives, to have goals in life, to have a safe haven, to think independently and to develop a high level of independence early in life..

This paper intends to examine how parents think and reflect on gender issues when they borrow books for their children at the library. The theory applied is Yvonne Hirdman?s theory of a gender system. A questionnaire was made available at the Children's department of Uppsala City Library in February, 2010. The material was compiled and analyzed with the intention to try to detect trends, patterns and themes, rather than statistics and hard data.Parents in the study perceive themselves as gender-conscious.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain insight into educators? views and work with circle time in preschool. To find out, I have referred to the following questions: How is your circle time performed in preschool? What objectives have teachers with the circle time? What impact has your circle time for the children in preschool?I have chosen to carry out qualitative interviews with three preschool teachers. After the interviews, I compared the educators? response to previous research.The survey shows that the circle time is one of the day´s highlights for preschool children.

Earlier studies shows that democracy within the preschool is an important and on-going work, but could implicate certain consequences. For example that goals regarding democracy and influence in the preschool, rarely is done in practice but instead remains just words on a paper. It could also mean that the pedagogues lack education and knowledge within the area, but also how they react to the influence of children. Preschool is expected to be a place for all children, no matter what luggage the child is carrying. The luggage is filled with the life experience, the personality and in this case the needs that the child has. The needs could be anything from nearness to physical and psychological disorders that requires more pedagogical attention.

This thesis is an investigation of Iranian immigrants and their use of libraries in Sweden. It isbased on a combination of a qualitative and a·quantitative method.Using a qualitative method, I give an outline of the history of lran from ancient times up to the present, as well as the different ethnological groups in Iran and their cultures. The main objective of this part is to clarify the contrasts between Iranian and Swedish cultural, social, linguistic and family structures, and also the characteristics of the crisis that most immigrants go through on their arrival in the new country. The qualitative method also involves structured telephone interviews with eight highly educated Iranians.This method was supplemented by a quantitative study through questionnaires of the attitudes· of lranian immigrants to libraries and reading. Iranians in Sweden turned out to be frequent Iibrary users.

The purpose of this study has been to describe and analyze how former foster children experienced foster care which have been filled with maltreatment and neglect and how this has influenced their adult life when it comes to health, education and relationships. We also wanted to study how the former foster children coped with their placement. Furthermore we wanted to study whether there has been any turningpoints during their growth. Finally we wanted to describe how the former foster children experienced the authorities control. To make the purpose of this study complete we chose to use qualitative interviews with six former foster children as our research method.

This essay examines the decline of reading comprehension in Swedish schools, and also aims to provide insight into the debate concerning a literary canon and its usage in schools. While some claim that the literary canon is only a list of irrelevant white dead men which only serves to perpetuate feelings of alienation in, for example, female students, others see it as a means to bring society together using the only literature that stood the test of time. This essay will look to studies concerning reading comprehension, and questions regarding reading habits which our own students answered. It will also explain the different viewpoints of both sides of the canon debate.There are several studies that show this decline in reading comprehension, PISA and PIRLS being the foremost of them. They point to a trend where the reading skills of boys are much worse than those of girls, a trend which still has not panned out.Bloom and the different researchers who are the basis for Verhaest's thesis are of the opinion that canonical literature serves a purpose in that it teaches students aesthetic literary values.

The purpose of this study is to examine how two educators at a preschool that is located in a neighborhood south of Stockholm works with TAKK with children who has Down syndrome in a language promotion purposes. The aim is also to investigate what teachers think about using TAKK with children without special needs and children with Down syndrome.In this study, I used qualitative research methods. I've used both observations and interviews to get answers to my questions. The theories which I have used in this thesis is, socio-cultural perspective, including integration and segregated integration.In order to find out how the educators work with TAKK I have asked these questions:How do the educators work with TAKK with children with Down syndrome from a language development perspective?What do the educators express about using TAKK with children without special needs and with children who has Down syndrome?My conclusions to these questions are that the literatures I have read in many ways are consistent with how they work.

In the area of short stories there is little doubt that Roald Dahl has been an influential writer. Dahl´s short stories have been presented to the general public through TVbraodcasts but in order to grasp the true spirit of Dahl´s writing the best method is, of course, reading his books. The fictional works of Roald Dahl can be divided into two major categories: stories for adults and stories for children. This essay is concerned with the second grouping and is an attempt to analyse three themes that are of particular importance to his work. After a brief biographical note on the author, the essay analyses the element of the macabre in Dahl?s writing.