The intention of this study is to find out how the English subject takes form and develops in the early years in school related to the curriculum, teachers, teaching material, students and parents. The methods of the survey have been classroom observations, teacher interviews, textbook analysis and a parents´ questionnaire. The findings of this study are that the knowledge of the teacher in and about the English subject can have effect on how the English subject will be presented to the students during the English lessons and the amount of the students oral production of the target language seem to depended on how much the teacher uses the target language in the classroom. The contents of the English lessons was overall structured by the curriculum. The parents and their interest in their children´s education seem to have had an impact on how much focus the English language get.

The study focuses on the use of poetry in language teaching in the lower grades in the Swedish school. Poetry has a reputation of being an art form with such specific rules and structures that children and teachers think that it is something that they do not have the ability to work with.  The purpose of this study is to get an understanding of how poetry is used in educating children. My research is based on the following questions. To which extent is poetry being used in schools and how is it being used?Can you as a teacher see any effects on childrens language development by using poetry?As a part of my study I have met with and interviewed four different people, who in one way or another is involved in teaching children. Two working teachers in the lower grades, one pedagogical resource and one artist that work with teachers in reaching different goals through the help of aesthetic processes.

The aim of this study was to get a survey and a deeper understanding of students? choice of language at upper secondary school, as well as their attitude and motivation to the German language. The rapports of diminished interests in studying languages at upper secondary school raised our interest in how to go against this and motivate students to actually choose to study a language. The study parted from a student perspective with focus on learning, attitude and motivation. A quantitative study with 168 pupils from 11 secondary schools in Halmstad as well as short interviews with their teachers have been used and analysed.Our study showed that students are not particular interested in German.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how a public library, as an information center and a meeting place, may contribute to bring Swedes and immigrants closer to one another, which is a prerequisite for integration. To realize this purpose, I have asked three questions. Which conditions and demands are stated in central documents for libraries immigrant activities? What do the library called Biblioteket Västers multicultural activities contain? How does the library conceive its object to strengthen immigrants identity so that its activities, contribute to integration? As method, I have used hermeneutics, which means that I have interpreted the thesis material. In the theory I have described relevant literature and confirmed the importance of identity, language and the majoritys acknowledgement for integration.

It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how femininity and masculinity is portraited in theeditorials of four Swedish lifestyle magazines; Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Moore and Slitz. Themain questions we based our study on are: What kind of relationship does the editor in chiefcreate with the intended reader? What conception of the world does the editor in chief createin the editorials? How does the editor in chief portray masculinity and femininity?In order to answer the questions above we performed a qualitative analysis of the editorials offour lifestyle magazines published during 2007. We used a discourse analysis with emphasison gender and how the editorials constructed masculinity and femininity and its stereotypicaltraits.Furthermore we based our results on a theory of the socially constructed gender. According tothis theory gender is constructed during our childhood and adolescense by the individuals andthe society surrounding us.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI, can be used for analyzing brain activity in subjects performing language tasks. The purpose of this study was to develop aphasia-friendly information adjusted to aphasic subjects participating in fMRI studies. The objectives were to investigate if adjusted information was important for the ability to perform language tasks and if the information could be used for different types of aphasia.Sixteen aphasic subjects participated in the study, six of these underwent fMRI. The participants varied in grade and type of aphasia. They had Swedish as their native language and were aged between 26 and 89, mean 57.

The gap between practise and theory is often described in negative words in teachers? professional lives. Learning study is a model for teachers´ professional development where a theoretical framework is used to enhance practice. The theoretical framework used by teachers in learning study is variation theory. In this study the research object is variation theory and the aim is to present how variation theory becomes a guiding principle to understand teaching and learning processes.

This qualitative study aims to investigate some secondary school teacers' attitudes to and experiences of motivation in their second language classrooms. Through qualitative interviews with five teachers some different perspectives on motivation and its function in second language acquisition have come to light. First, motivation is seen as something important and some teachers tend to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Those who do so tend to value intrinsic motivation more highly. Secondly, teachers believe they can affect students' levels of motivation.

 The aim of this essay was to examine the way preschool teachers and children converse during school meals, and also the way preschool teachers start and develop conversations during meals. The conversations were analyzed from the topic of conversation and the teachers' ways of using language acts such as questions, remarks, exhortations. The study was based on observations, tape recording and contact schedule. The result shows that the topic of conversation is significant for how involved teachers are in conversations during meals. The result also shows how conversations develop or end depending on what language acts teachers use.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the genrebased instruction applied in multicultural classrooms. My observations were carried out in three different classrooms, whit the educators constantly working on language development off the students. Two observations were carried out in Swedish, with a teacher of Swedish as a second language and the Swedish-teacher working with students together. In these two lessons in Swedish, I took away from Pauline Gibbons model, while the third lesson in civics I assumed from Eija Kuyumcu genre model. Both models are based on the Australian research around the genrebased teaching.

This master thesis concerns whether Swedish non-financial listed firms act in accordance with the optimal capital structure theory and/or pecking order theory. The examined period is 1998-2004 and we discover that Swedish companies neither follow optimal capital structure theory nor pecking order theory. From our results we conclude that there exists no single point of the capital structure which is optimal. Rather it seems as if the optimal point lies in-between an interval from 0 to the industry average, where firms tend to be indifferent to their debt-ratios. Our results show that Swedish companies prefer internal financing followed by equity and as last choice debt issuance..

The purpose of this study is to investigate the lunchtime from a language development perspective. It will compare two preschools with different ways of organizing mealtimes and observe the conversations between teachers and children. It will also study the ways in which a meal is served and how it affects the conversations. In one of the preschools the children eat in a proper dining room where the food is served as a buffet while in the other preschool the children eat in the preschoolarea and the food is served in bowls on the tables. I also want to investigate how two of these preschool teachers reflect on the mealtimes as part of the language development plan.

Our aim in this study is to explore if the schoolchildren?s written language differs from the?National tests? in Swedish and from Facebook. We specifically want to see if we candiscover words and expressions mainly from the English language or other languages in the?National tests? in Swedish written by the schoolchildren in the ages between 18-20 yearsold. The methods that we used to discover the results in this study was; to interview threeteachers, have 30 schoolchildren answer a questionnaire survey, analyze 30 written ?Nationaltests? in Swedish by the schoolchildren and finally analyze two Facebook walls from twoschoolchildren.

This thesis endavours to examine whether differences between original and translation in literary translation are systematic and predictable by studying a Swedish detective novel and its Japanese translation. The domain of the novel chosen for analysis is the reported speech (i.e. dialog).Translation Studies suggests that knowledge of the literary norms of the Target Language of the translation and of the status of translations in the Target Language's literary system, enables one to predict if and what differences between original and translation will appear.A survey of the scholarly literature concerning literary norms in the Japanese system and the status of translation within said system was performed and the following hypotheses were postulated: 1. Given sufficient knowledge of the norms of the Target Language's literary system and the status of translations within said system, the nature of differences between original and translation can be predicted. 2.