Förmågan att lyssna är en viktig kommunikativ kompetens för att människan ska kunna förstå sin omvärld. Samtidigt har läsningen traditionellt sett en dominerande roll i grundskolesammanhang i fråga om kunskapsinhämtning. Modellen Simple View of Reading har ett omfattande stöd i forskningen och anger att avkodning och språkförståelse, där hörförståelse ingår, ligger till grund för läsförståelse. Med sambandet mellan hörförståelse och läsförståelse i åtanke har denna studie för avsikt att utifrån kvantitativ data undersöka elevers förmåga att förstå en elevnära, åldersadekvat och skönlitterär text dels utifrån traditionell läsning, dels utifrån ett färdiginspelat ljudboksformat. Totalt har 109 elever i årskurs fyra, från två olika skolor utspridda på fem klasser, deltagit i undersökningen och antingen läst eller lyssnat på texten Anton och gänget. Eleverna har svarat på flervalsfrågor om texten via det digitala formatet Google Formulär och frågorna har tagits fram utifrån de fyra läsförståelseprocesser som ligger till grund för den internationella studien PIRLS. Studiens resultat visar att det finns statistiskt signifikanta skillnader både för läsförståelseprocesserna 3 och 4. Utifrån resultaten finns det skäl att diskutera huruvida det finns en outnyttjad potential i ljudboksformatet för svenskämnet i skolan.   

In the late 70’s Gibson (1979) introduced the concept of affordance. Initially framed around the needs of an organism in its environment, over the years the term has been appropriated and debated at length by a number of researchers in various fields. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and Norman (1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are only present when they are perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see Linder (2013) for a recent example). Here, Kress et al. (2001) have claimed that different modes have different specialized affordances. Then, building on this idea, Airey and Linder (2009) suggested that there is a critical constellation of modes that students need to achieve fluency in before they can experience a concept in an appropriate disciplinary manner. Later, Airey (2009) nuanced this claim, shifting the focus from the modes themselves to a critical constellation of semiotic resources, thus acknowledging that different semiotic resources within a mode often have different affordances (e.g. two or more diagrams may form the critical constellation).

In this theoretical paper the concept of disciplinary affordance (Fredlund et al., 2012) is suggested as a useful analytical tool for use in education. The concept makes a radical break with the views of both Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the discernment of one individual, it refers to the disciplinary community as a whole. Put simply, the disciplinary affordances of a given semiotic resource are determined by those functions that the resource is expected to fulfil by the disciplinary community. Disciplinary affordances have thus been negotiated and developed within the discipline over time. As such, the question of whether these affordances are inherent or discerned becomes moot. Rather, from an educational perspective the issue is whether the meaning that a semiotic resource affords to an individual matches the disciplinary affordance assigned by the community. The power of the term for educational work is that learning can now be framed as coming to discern the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources.

In this paper we will briefly discuss the history of the term affordance, define the term disciplinary affordance and illustrate its usefulness in a number of educational settings.

This study aims to observe linguistic disparities in the distribution of the conversational dominance strategies interruptions, amount of talk, and questions in the first U.S. 2020 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Subsequently, these findings establish the evaluation of how the interactive phenomena relate to the masculinity conceptualizations of hegemonic masculinity and subordination. To examine the study objective, the methodology conducted was a discourse analysis of the debate transcript. Hence, the method intended to measure to which extent Biden and Trump employed interruptions, amount of talk, and questions during the debate. The outcome of the review established the discursive dominance framework used to discuss how the presidential candidates demonstrated adherence to diverse masculinities’ conceptualizations. The discourse analysis outcome revealed an asymmetrical distribution of the interactive phenomena across all variables measured in favor of Donald Trump. These results suggest that Trump’s discursive performance signaled adherence to hegemonic masculinity norms to a greater extent than Biden through employing more conversational dominance strategies during the debate. Consequently, Biden’s discursive performance indicated closer relations to masculine subordination than Trump’s performance.

This essay investigates how the usage of minimal responses differs between men and women in different situations. There are three factors included in the analysis, gender of the interlocutor, formality, and the number of participants in the conversations. For each factor, the frequency and function of minimal responses are investigated. Eleven conversations are collected from the Santa Barbara Corpus to attain this aim. The method conducted to analyse the conversations is divided into two parts. The first part is to count the minimal responses used and calculate the frequency of usage for each speaker in all the conversations. The second part is a close analysis of the function of the minimal responses used by noticing whether they are disruptive or supportive. The results show that women use minimal responses at a higher frequency compared to men except in informal conversations. Also, there is no significant difference in the function of minimal responses between men and women. However, the minimal responses used in the informal conversations seem more disruptive. In pair and group conversations minimal responses can be used disruptively. However, if one considers the context, it seems that minimal responses in group conversations are collaborative, despite being disruptive.

We report an experiment investigating how stimulus complexity and conceptual fluency (i.e., the ease of deriving meaning) influence aesthetic liking judgments for abstract artworks. We presented participants with paintings at two levels of complexity (high vs. low) and five levels of conceptual fluency (determined from a prior norming study) and requested separate ratings of beauty and creativity. Our predictions were derived from the PIA Model (Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking), which views aesthetic preferences as being formed by two, distinct fluency-based processes: an initial, automatic, stimulus-driven, default process and a subsequent, perceiver-driven deliberative process. A key trigger for deliberative processing is assumed to be disfluency at the default stage, as caused by factors such as visual complexity. We predicted that complexity and conceptual fluency would interact in determining aesthetic liking, with people preferring complex stimuli, but only when these are relatively easy to process conceptually. Our results supported this prediction for beauty judgments, although creativity judgments showed a curiously uniform profile. Nevertheless, the predictive capacity of the PIA Model in relation to beauty judgments attests to the explanatory strength of this default?interventionist theory of aesthetic liking. We conclude by noting important parallels between the PIA Model and the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, which likewise has broad reach in explaining how defaultness and non-defaultness affect pleasure across a range of linguistic and pictorial stimuli.

The present study investigates communicative strategies used by a group of four upper-secondary L2 learners of English. To be able to reach this goal, I have recorded and transcribed a conversation between these students in order to detect natural communication. The communicative strategies I have looked for were: pauses and hesitations, questions, code-switching and message abandonment.

Previous research on communicative strategies is divided into two different fields. These two approaches define and classify communication strategies as either interactional or psycholinguistic.  The definition and classification of communicate strategies depends viz. on what kind of approach is used. 

To describe the development of words and sentences in Swedish children 16-28 months old, 900 parental reports on 336 children were analyzed. Subjects were randomly selected from the national birth register, and there was a response rate of 88%. The assessments were made using the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory-words and sentences (SECDI-w&s).

Age-based norms for productive vocabulary, pragmatic skills, grammar skills, and maximum length of utterance (MaxLU) were determined. We describe the development of feedback morphemes, semantic categories, and single words and tasks. Correlation across measures was significant, and especially strong between vocabulary size and grammar skills. Optimized positive predictive values were high for 25 to 28 month predictions (71%-88%), and vocabulary scores were found to be of particular predictive importance. No significant gender differences were detected. The clinical relevance of the instrument is discussed.

Föreliggande studie har sin utgångspunkt i det sociokulturella perspektivet. Syftet i studien är att undersöka hur 8 legitimerade grundlärare resonerar kring och hanterar talrädsla hos elever i årskurs 1–3 i undervisningen. Studien undersöker också hur lärarna arbetar förebyggande för att få sina elever att våga tala i klassrummet samt möjliga orsaker till att talrädsla uppstår. Studien bygger på kvalitativa intervjuer och resultatet har analyserats med tematisk innehållsanalys. I resultatet framkommer att talrädsla förekommer i de flesta klasser i olika utsträckning och ger sig till uttryck på olika sätt. Studien visar att alla respondenter använder sig av strategier för att främja talet hos elever i klassrummet. I resultatet framkommer även att en trygg miljö i klassrummet är viktigt för att eleverna ska känna sig trygga att framföra redovisningar och svara på tilltal framför klassen. Resultatet visar även att talrädsla påverkar läs och skrivutvecklingen i de tidiga skolåren och försvårar bedömningen för lärarna av eleverna i ämnet svenska. 

This study aims at investigating differences in derogatory word use between heteronormative rap artists and rap artists identifying with LGBTQ norms. A list of six profane words to be content analysed was constructed. These words were divided into three subcategories: those generally related to men (dick and nigga), women (bitch and pussy), or language in general (fuck and shit). The study examines the frequency of these derogatory words in randomly selected rap music and investigates how these frequencies differ in mainstream and LGBTQ artists' song lyrics. A content analysis of four randomly selected songs each from ten randomly selected mainstream artists and ten randomly selected LGBTQ artists was conducted. Two hypotheses that were derived from the literature (Wilson, 2007; Monk-Turner & Sylvertooth, 2008) were tested. It was expected that (1) general profanity (the use of fuck and shit) would occur most frequently in the lyrics of both mainstream and LGBTQ artists and that (2) derogatory words directed at women would not be as frequent in the lyrics of LGBTQ artists as in mainstream rappers' lyrics. On the contrary, the data show that profanities aimed at women occur more frequently in LGBTQ artists' lyrics. The data also show that general profanity is most common in LGBTQ artists' lyrics but not in the lyrics of mainstream artists, where profanities aimed at men was most frequent. However, there were several factors which affected the validity of the study. The issue of whether profane words are always used in a derogatory way in the songs or not is a big methodological shortcoming of the study in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, the small sample size indicates that one should be cautious about stating generalisations based on tendencies seen in the data.

This study investigates how teachers and students in a Swedish upper secondary school experience the sudden transition to teaching and learning English as a second language online. Students and teachers have answered questions in online questionnaires and the answers were analyzed and compared to previous research and secondary literature. The results indicate that both students and teachers prefer the physical context compared to the online context. Communication and natural interactions are expressed to be the worst consequences for both the teachers and students. This study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the effects on both teachers and students the transition to an online context due to Covid-19 have had and how similar events can be conducted better. 

Focusing on Swedish student teachers’ oral presentations in a rhetoric class, this article studies interactional role shift as a multimodal practice. The role shifts under scrutiny concern shifting from student teacher to teacher, thus anticipating the students’ future profession. A central feature of the article is a discussion of how role shift may be conceptualised as a communicative project, thus highlighting the different modes of communication used by the students, and consequently to examine its potential as a facilitator of students’ professional and academic development. The data was collected using an ethnographical approach, resulting in a collection of 21 video-recorded oral presentations, together with other relevant semiotic resources. The data is analysed by the employment of concepts from nexus analysis and the notion of communicative projects. Through a discourse analytical approach to social action in interaction, the analysis shows how role shifts are constructed of patterns of smaller actions that add up to three primary actions: setting the scene, changing perspective, and performing the new role. These primary actions are multimodally chained together, and the results demonstrate how social actors use instructional texts in combination with multimodal recourses in order to perform their role shifts.

Att handleda lärarstudenters examensarbeten kan på många sätt innebära komplexa undervisningssituationer. Handledning i sig pekas ofta ut som ett exempel på ’learning by doing’ (Wallström & Samuelsson 2023), där det är svårt att fungera som en bra handledare om man saknar handledarerfarenhet. För studenter är det inte heller alltid så tydligt vad som förväntas av dem (se t.ex. Blåsjö & Christensson 2018). Man kan dessutom fundera på vad examensarbetet inom lärarutbildningen egentligen ska fokusera mest på: yrkesförberedelse, vetenskaplighet, pedagogiska frågor, eller kanske alla dessa punkter (Erixon & Josephson 2017:15).

I den här presentationen kommer jag att fokusera på den konkreta handledningssituationen. Något som handledare av examensarbeten inom lärarutbildning kan ställas inför är engagerade studenter som snabbt vill ut i skolor för att intervjua lärare/elever och observera undervisning. Inte sällan brinner studenterna för någon aktuell fråga. När materialet sedan är insamlat och bearbetat kan analysarbetet ofta landa i en kvalitativ innehållsanalys av intervjumaterialet, där observationsmaterialet blir kontextuell kunskap som i bästa fall kan stödja tolkningar i innehållsanalysen.

Syftet är att undersöka och utvärdera hur lärarstudenter som vill göra fältarbete i skolvärlden kan använda ramverket medierad diskursanalys (MDA: Scollon 2001; Scollon & Scollon 2004) som ett hjälpmedel för att kombinera olika typer av data i strävan efter att förstå en större social fråga. MDA, som ockå kallas nexusanalys, är en handfast form av diskursanalys där människors agerande förstås i ljuset av deras tidigare erfarenheter, interpersonella relationer och de diskurser som är relevanta i handlingssituationen. Presentationen bygger dels på handledarerfarenheter och intervjuer med grundlärare som handletts i att använda olika delar av MDA i sina examensarbeten, dels på en nyutkommen handbok om ramverket (Blåsjö, Christensson & Hanell 2024).

One of the most important points of contact that student teachers have with the teaching profession occurs during placement, as placement provides a prime opportunity for them to interact with pupils and to further develop their teaching. In this article, a mediated discourse analytical perspective is employed as a lens to study a student teacher during his final teaching placement, with the aim of exploring how resemiotizations of previous experiences in the shape of oral stories can be interactionally used in the classroom. The data consist of three video recorded oral presentations, two video recorded sessions in a classroom, interview data, and observational field notes. Due to its potential to link past multimodal semiosis to present-time actions, nexus analysis is employed as the method for analysis. By unpacking a student teacher’s use of oral stories in the classroom, the study demonstrates how stories are adaptable resources that can be used to mark proximity to pupils, and thus serve as a means to manage the interaction order in the classroom. This is an activity with relevance for the teaching profession and, by extension, student teachers' development of professional identity.

This thesis comprises three separate studies that together explore how Swedish student teachers construct or produce professional identity in interaction while navigating different institutional and professional instances of teacher education. As a discourse analytical contribution to research on teacher identity, the main theoretical framework is mediated discourse theory (e.g. Scollon 2001a). For data construction and analysis in the studies, different parts of the two related methodologies of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris 2011) are employed. Constructed through an ethnographic approach, the interactional data consist of audio and video recordings of interaction in instances from three different components of a Swedish teacher education program: a rhetoric course, a bachelor thesis course in history and teaching placement. Furthermore, the data include observational field notes and interviews, as well as resources used by the participants, primarily written texts. 

Taking place early on in teacher education, Study I focuses on student teachers performing oral presentations under the fictitious presumption that they are speaking as teachers. Employing the notion of communicative project (Linell 1998), the empirical aim of the study is to shed light on how student teachers manage institutional affordances and constraints affecting interactional role shifts from student teacher to teacher. In Study II, three student teachers are writing their bachelor theses in the subject of history, and the study focuses on the interactional production of teacher identity of one of the students during seminars. While partly being a methodological study, Study II empirically explores how student teachers interactionally relate to their future profession in an academic disciplinary setting, highlighting which actors and institutions are involved in the production of professional identity. Finally, Study III concentrates on a student teacher during his final teaching placement. Focusing on previous experiences resemiotized as stories, Study III highlights how discourse re-emerging from the historical body (Nishida 1958) can be used in interaction in producing identity. 

The results suggest that the production of teacher identity by the student teachers is a co-operative and communicative task, where previous experiences as well as an anticipatory perspective on the teaching profession are important features. The three studies identify different resources that can be used and adapted by students to suit different purposes in professional identity production, described as textual resources, embodied resources, and narrative resources. In turn, the different uses of such resources motivate the need for studying identity in interaction with an approach where ethnographic and sociocultural knowledge is part of the analysis. The creative use of resources in identity production highlights that students use knowledge and experience linked to academic and professional as well as everyday discourse in producing professional identity. Presuming an interest in opportunities for student teachers to develop professional identity during their education, it appears fruitful to reflect upon how potential resources are designed and implemented in teacher education, and how institutional affordances and constraints affect the possibilities of using them.

By testing a model for analysing identity in interaction, the present article explores how a history student teacher produces social identity in relation to his future profession as a teacher, with an important point of departure being the relationship between the academic and professional aspects of teacher education. This is addressed through an empirical analysis of a student teacher’s identity production in a specific academic setting: a bachelor thesis course. The main body of data consists of audio recordings and video recordings from a group of three student teachers giving feedback on each other’s theses. With respect to methodology, the article employs a model from multimodal (inter)action analysis that focuses on the concept of vertical identity – the notion that identity in interaction is produced in three layers of discourse simultaneously. The results show that the main participant produces the identity of history teacher in an academic setting where such identity production is not encouraged, e.g. by resemiotisising curricula: thus, policy documents can work as a tool when producing teacher identity. This production of identity is done by employing strong agency, which consequently points to the need of a more elaborated discussion on agency in the tested model.

           This study was conducted in order to find out what translanguaging practices are used in an English learning multilingual classroom and how those practices can create scaffolding structures for the students’ language development. By attending a second language English class with adult multilingual students and conducting a structured observation it was possible to achieve gathered material sufficient to answer these questions. In class all the translaguaging incidents were written down and afterwards these incidents were structured into different themes to outline scaffolding structures. After analyzing the notes it was clear to see that in this particular class translanguaging was used as a strategy to develop supportive learning structures. The result shows the translanguaging practices correlation between teacher and students as well as in relation to different types of educational classroom applications. Besides those features the results show some indications about the spoken production of translanguaging.

Academic writing is often referred to as formal, but the construct of formality is yet to be clearly defined. To some scholars (e.g., Kolln & Gray, 2017), formality refers to the presence or absence of certain linguistic features in a text. To others (e.g., Smith, 2019), it refers to situational characteristics of a text (e.g., research articles are formal because of their target audience and purpose). 

The goal of this study is to explore the elusive construct of formality in the context of academic writing. We asked instructors of first-year composition courses to rate the level of formality in 60 short texts on a five-point scale. The texts were from two publication types (university textbooks, journal articles) in three disciplines (psychology, biology, history). We used instructors’ perceptions to (a) identify relationships between perceptions of formality and the use of linguistic features in academic texts, and (b) determine the extent to which the situational characteristics of texts (e.g., differences in audience, purpose) are related to perceptions of formality. To investigate the linguistic features that are associated with more formal texts, we used Multi-Dimensional analysis to reduce 56 lexico-grammatical features to five dimensions of linguistic variation and correlated those dimension scores with instructor’s perceptions. 

Preliminary analysis indicates that texts perceived to be more formal included more linguistic features that help package information such as pre-nominal modifiers, nouns, and agentless passive voice (r = .58). Texts that were considered to be less formal included more of the linguistic features associated with colloquial narrative such as phrasal verbs, past tense verbs, and activity verbs (r = -.50). Additionally, differences in publication types explained 55% of the variance in perceptions of formality. These findings can inform how formality is taught and assessed, contributing to equity in the assessment of student writing.

Academic writing is often referred to as “formal,” but the teaching and assessment of formality can be challenging as formality has been conceptualized in many ways. The goal of this study is to explore the elusive construct of formality in the context of academic writing, especially with regard to what formality means to academic writing instructors. We used instructors’ perceptions of formality (i) to identify relationships between the use of linguistic features in academic texts and perceptions of formality and (ii) to determine the extent to which the situational characteristics of texts (e.g., differences in audience, purpose, and discipline) are related to perceptions of formality. Specifically, we asked 72 academic writing instructors to rate the formality level of 60 short academic text excerpts on a five-point scale. The excerpts were sampled from two publication types (university textbooks, journal articles) in three disciplines (psychology, biology, history). Overall, the results indicate that perceptions of formality can be explained by both linguistic features and situational characteristics. As linguistic features and situational characteristics are intertwined, differences in perceptions of formality seem to be functionally motivated. Implications for the teaching of academic writing are discussed.

Swedish Language Structure has for many years been a subject that caused study delay for many students. SLS is a course in basic grammar including phonology and morphology and is part of the teacher’s program and the Swedish language program at the University of Gävle.When a large part of all our distance courses became completely IT-based, (i.e. without any physical meetings) SLS became an even greater obstacle for students. I decided that I wanted to try to create not only a virtual classroom, but a virtual student environment where students would have the opportunity to communicate in an informal way and become more connected to each other. When I discussed the issues with SLS, and especially the online version in pedagogical forum of humanities at HiG, I was given the opportunity to turn this idea into a pedagogical project with support from the Learning Center.

I adjusted the course literature, presentations and communication tools so that they were easily used interactively in order to create a safe and inspiring learning environment. I also made use of social media and explored the possibilities of online examination. Finally, I changed the focus in the course from a theoretical, normative perspective on grammar to a practical, descriptive one.

This study reexamines Lakoff’s (1973) claim that women use more hedges than men is true. Because of the vast number of hedges, this study focuses on two hedges: I think and I’m sure. It also investigates how the included hedges are used by men and women to express belief and opinion. The study has been carried out with the help of a corpus called British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014). From this database, authentic conversations that include these hedges in clause-final position have been extracted. By using the extracted and processed data, a conclusion can be drawn regarding similarities and differences in how often men and women use these hedges and in what context they are used. The results show that Lakoff’s (1973) claim has a certain truth to it, since 63.0% of the valid I think tokens and 67.6% of the valid I’m sure tokens were produced by women. As for the expression of belief or opinion, the results points towards I think and I’m sure upholding traditional gender traits.

I denna uppsats är syftet att bidra med kunskap om olika synsätt, resurser och metoder som lärare och speciallärare använder sig av i läs- och skrivutvecklingen för att elever i årskurs 2 ska nå målen i årskurs 3. Undervisningen i svenska ska ge förutsättningar för att eleverna ska utveckla sitt tal- och skriftspråk och i slutet av årskurs 3 ska eleverna kunna läsa elevnära texter med flyt samt lära sig att använda strategier under hela sin skolutveckling. Eleverna ska även kunna skriva enkla texter med läslig handstil. Varje elevs individuella behov ska tillgodoses i skolan för att skapa bättre möjlighet till att nå målen i de olika ämnena. 

Undersökningen bygger på en kvalitativ metod med semistrukturerade intervjuer där totalt 9 lärarintervjuer genomfördes på tre olika skolor. I analysarbetet tillämpades en tematisk analys som fokuserade på metoder, resurser och synsätt kopplade till specialpedagogiska insatser inom den tidiga läs- och skrivundervisningen. 

Resultatet visar att respondenterna har goda kunskaper om specialpedagogiska insatser i undervisningen. Deras synsätt visar att det är viktigt med rätt stöd, resurser och metoder i undervisningen samt att se varningssignalerna i tid för att kunna ge rätt anpassning. Resultatet visar även att det är svårt att individanpassa och gruppanpassa på grund av elevernas olika kunskaper och förutsättningar i klassrummet. I studien framgår även att elever med NPF diagnoser har andra förutsättningar att nå målen i skolan och det är lärarens viktigaste uppgift att hitta metoder i undervisningen som skapar rätt förutsättningar för att alla elever ska nå målen. 

I studien framträder även att samarbetet mellan lärare och speciallärare är av stor vikt för att ge alla elever möjlighet till utveckling efter sina behov. Studien visar att det är viktigt att lärarna har en bred syn på undervisningsmetoder och har förmågan att använda sig av tillgängliga resurser i skolorna. Det framkommer också att den viktigaste delen är lärarens arbetssätt och förmåga att strukturera och genomföra individanpassade undervisningsmetoder genom att använda sig av differentierad undervisning för att alla elever ska få rätt förutsättningar. 

This study describes the typical course and variability in major areas of communicative development for 228 Swedish-speaking children between 8 and 16 months of age. The assessments were made by parental reports with the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventories (SECDI) using a semi-longitudinal design. Age-based norms for understanding of phrases, vocabulary comprehension, vocabulary production and use of gestures are described at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile levels. More lexical verbs were found among the first words in comprehension than in production. An extensive variability within individuals in onset and development was found for the assessed skills. The individual differences proved to be stable over 4–6 months. No gender differences were found for comprehension of phrases, total gestures, vocabulary compre-hension, or for vocabulary production. Strong, unique associations were found between total gestures and vocabulary comprehension and between vocabulary comprehension and vocabulary production. In contrast, no unique association was found between gestures and vocabulary production. The results generally concur with those reported for English-speaking American children by Fenson et al. (1993, 1994).

Denna studie har genomförts i syfte att bidra med fördjupade kunskaper om lärares metoder och arbetssätt inom den tidiga läsinlärningen mot en tillgänglig undervisning sett till varje enskild elevs behov och förutsättningar. Detta har gjorts genom att identifiera likheter och skillnader i utsagor från tio verksamma lärare i årskurs 1. Studien utfördes med kvalitativ ansats med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer. För att uppfylla studiens syfte och besvara dess forskningsfrågor utgick vi ifrån den sociokognitiva teorin samt policy enactment-teorin, där centrala begrepp såsom self efficacy och rekontextualisering har betydelse för vår undersökning. Studiens resultat visar att en samstämmighet råder bland lärarna kring de arbetssätt och metoder som anses mest framgångsrika för den tidiga läsinlärningen. Enligt vår studies resultat anses den syntetiska metoden vara mest framgångsrik, men samtidigt visar resultatet att den analytiska metoden används och främjar inlärningen hos elever med begynnande läs- och skrivsvårigheter. I studiens resultat påvisas det att lärarna arbetar med en blandning av metoder och arbetssätt för att främja en tillgänglig undervisning som anpassas till alla elevers individuella behov.

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to identify difficulties some Swedish learners have with listening comprehension in the English 5 course in Upper Secondary Schools and to find methods of teaching such as scaffolding, schematic knowledge, preparation and peer cooperation that may prove successful. The methodology for this study was to test three groups of students representing three different programs of study at a high school in Sweden. These groups performed two different tasks to test theories about listening comprehension methods, and data was collected through test results and observations in the classroom, which were subsequently analyzed through discussion and comparison. The study showed that affective filters affected learning. However, scaffolding, schematic knowledge, preparation, and peer cooperation proved successful as reflected in higher all-around test scores. The researcher has attempted to identify the main aspects that make English listening comprehension difficult for Swedish learners, and to come up with ideas on how to break down the barriers to learning in order to promote improved listening comprehension in both live classrooms and in online learning situations.

Digital games are a common interest today and research has shown that digital games affect English vocabulary building in a positive way. This study aims to examine the attitudes of teachers in grade four to six towards the use of digital games for vocabulary building in the classroom and how they are used to do that. There is a lack of research about this subject in a Swedish context which is why this study is important. The study used a mixed method approach where online surveys and interviews were conducted with certified English teachers of grade four to six in Sweden. The attitudes of teachers were found to be generally positive towards using digital games to build vocabulary and the most common use of them is to both practice words and phrases the students already know and to teach new words and phrases. However, insufficient time to prepare digital games for use in the classroom seems to be the biggest challenge teachers face when implementing them. The potential digital games have for enhancing vocabulary building and motivating students is why this study is relevant.

This article advocates a particular type of semi-automated approach to working with corpus data termed “shared evaluation”, the central idea of which is that the computer takes over more of the work of sorting and classifying the data, while a subsequent pass by a human coder ensures the ultimate accuracy of the data selection and classification. The article begins with a discussion of the traditional approach to corpus data and the tools that are currently available. It then describes the shared evaluation approach and compares this to a typical concordancer-based approach. The article goes on to present SVEP, a computer program developed by the authors to implement this approach and offered freely to other researchers, describing the most significant aspects of the program and its use. A case study involving adjective complementation is then presented, including examples of how SVEP was used in the study and an evaluation of the accuracy the program achieved. The article ends with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of SVEP in particular (and some ways the program might be improved) and of semi-automated approaches such as shared evaluation in general.

The study focuses on three research questions. The first question addresses whether it is possible to improve phonetic perception in English as an L2 for Chinese primary school children speaking Mandarin as an L1, through the didactic methods High Variability Phonetic Training and Onset Rhyme Detection Test. The second question addresses if it is possible to improve phonetic perception over a short period of time, using didactic methods focused on improving phonetic perception during two sessions for each method. The third and last question addresses, if it is one of the two didactic methods, High Variability Phonetic Training and Onset Rhyme Detection Test, is better than the other in a short-term learning situation.

Forty-five students participated in the study, divided into three groups; one was a control group. Two groups received treatment, one with the Onset Rhyme Detection Test and the other High Variability Phonetic Training method. All groups conducted a pretest and posttest. The results revealed that the two methods used had some positive effect on the development of phonetic perception for Chinese primary school children. Through didactic methods, it is possible to improve phonetic perception to some extent, even during a short period of time. 

The video game industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world today. The fact that playing video games has become such a popular recreational activity among youths and adolescents has created a need for research investigating the effects of video game playing. Because of the role of the English language as a global lingua franca, most video games are released in English. Since most video games are released in English, many believe that the utilization of video games can help learners of English to improve their knowledge of how to utilize the English language. The aim of this study is to investigate whether video game playing does positively influence the English receptive vocabulary level of ESL learners. In addition, the present study also investigated the influence of other factors, such as the utilization of online communication tools, the average time spent playing video games, and the type of video games played, on English receptive vocabulary level. The study was conducted using quantitative research methods. Since the aim of the study was to investigate the relation between two separate aspects, the study had to utilize two separate elicitation methods for the data collection: one questionnaire (that was supposed to determine each informant’s video game habits) and one vocabulary test (that was supposed to get an approximation of each informant’s receptive vocabulary level). When the data had been collected, the tests were corrected, and the participants were categorized according to the previously mentioned variables. The mean scores of the categories were later examined and compared to each other. Differences between groups that were of high importance were further examined, with a t-test, to determine whether the difference was statistically significant or not. The results of the study show that the vocabulary level difference between ESL learners that do play video games and ESL learner that do not play video game is insignificant. The results further show that the utilization of online communication tools while playing video games positively influences vocabulary level, as the mean score difference on the vocabulary test between OCT users and OCT non-users was revealed to be significant by the t-test. The analysed data thus show that the influence of the utilization of online communication tools on English receptive vocabulary level are more significant that the influence of playing video games.

This study, focusing on subject-verb agreement, investigates the correlation between Swedish upper-secondary students' English proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge. The research adopts a methodological approach inspired by Karen Roehr's 2007 study, utilising both language proficiency and metalinguistic tests. Participants included Swedish students studying English 5, 6, and 7 in upper-secondary school. The study explores whether explicit productive and receptive knowledge correlates with students' metalinguistic understanding of subject-verb agreement. The study's results indicated a slight positive correlation between Swedish upper-secondary students' English proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge, specifically regarding subject-verb agreement. However, none of the correlations found were statistically significant. This suggests that while there might be a link between English proficiency levels and metalinguistic understanding, the evidence from this study is not strong enough to confirm such a relationship definitively.

Swedish learners of English have problems in managing the subject-verb agreement rule (Källqvist and Petersson 2006, Estling Vannestål 2015). Studies show that extramural activities in English improve language acquisition and language production (Sundqvist 2009). The aim of the essay is to investigate whether extramural activities affect students’ ability to correctly apply the subject-verb agreement rule. A google questionnaire was handed out to 64 students in the course of English 5 in upper secondary school. The students were asked to answer questions about their extramural habits and to do a test on subject-verb agreement. The results indicate that students have knowledge of the subject-verb agreement rule to some extent and that extramural activities in English may possibly have some impact on the ability to correctly apply the subject-verb agreement rule. The results could also be due to the academic motivation. The results show that the difference across gender is negligible but that there is a slightly larger difference across preparatory programs and vocational programs.

This work explains the types of affixation errors second language learners make when learning English word formation processes, especially derivational and inflectional affixations. The data for the study were collected as primary sources from two secondary schools in Sweden. The data were analyzed with the use of Error Analysis noted by Corder (1967) and the error analysis framework adapted by Ellis et al. (2005, p. 57). The method chosen was to identify, classify, describe,and evaluate derivational and inflectional affixation errors. In total 2,812 answers were retrieved. The results consist of some findings, for example, some of the derivationaland inflectional affixations errors were noticed to be intralingual and interlingual. Also, the nature of the errors issuch that they are either transferred, omissive, additive or substitutive errors. Moreover, the errors were also due to overgeneralization, including substitutionerrors, or additive errors. Previous research findings showedstudents make grammatical errors with letter insertions, letter omission, or substitutionerrors. This study made the same findings as students made errors of letter insertion, letter omission, substitution errors, and errors due to overgeneralization. Some of the most difficult derivational and inflectional affixation errors were also noticed across all the grades.

Internationally, female L2 learners of English are believed to outperform males in all areas including writing. However, in the context of Sweden, the gender gap has been reducing in recent decades. A body of literature focusing on gender differences and syntactic complexity of Swedish high school L2 learners of English using the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC) has not provided strong evidence to suggest female students outperform male students. Furthermore, the analyses of most of these studies do not take into consideration other important control variables, lack thorough statistical testing and use small datasets. This study uses linear regression analysis to test the hypothesis of whether females outperform males. It uses the ratio of dependent clauses to total clauses (DC/C) as a proxy of syntactic complexity which is estimated using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). A total of 663 essays written by year one and year two senior high school L2 learners taken from the ULEC dataset are used in the analysis. The results clearly reject the hypothesis that females outperform males. An inconclusive yet interesting insight which requires further investigation is some evidence from the results which suggests that males may, in fact, outperform females when programme fixed effects are considered.

The present compilation thesis investigates adjectives complemented by that- and to-clauses. More specifically, the thesis is concerned with extraposed (e.g. it is likely that she will win and it is important to win) and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I’m sure that he’s alive and I’m glad to see you). The thesis is most fundamentally concerned with the study of linguistic variation. Thus the aim of the thesis is to explain why a certain construction is used in a given context.

The data used in the studies comes from the British National Corpus (BNC). Study I proposes a semi-automated approach to variable patterns in corpus data. The study describes the creation of a computer program which has been designed to facilitate the extraction and coding of corpus data. In Study II, extraposed and post-predicate that- and to-clauses are contrasted in terms of their variation across genres, their lexical diversity and the meanings expressed by the adjectives most frequently found in each construction. Study III tests the applicability of the Complexity Principle and the Uniform Information Density Principle on adjectival data, by examining the variation between retaining and omitting the complementizer that across extraposed and post-predicate clauses. Study IV tests whether the syntactic status of I’m sure is similar to that of I think, i.e. whether it exhibits the same signs of grammaticalization.

The results show that extraposed and post-predicate that-clauses are associated with similar meanings but differ in most other respects. Compared to post-predicate that-clauses, extraposed that-clauses are more frequent in formal genres, they are found with fewer instances of that-omission, and they are found to be more frequently represented in cognitively complex environments. Similarly, the results also show that extraposed and post-predicate to-clauses are associated with similar meanings, but differ in terms of their genre distribution. Instead, in terms of meaning, extraposed that- and to-clauses on the one hand, and post-predicate that- and to-clauses on the other, are similar to each other. The thesis highlights the importance of studying adjectival complementation in its own right, and not to treat it as subordinate to, or part of, verbal complementation.

This study tests the applicability of the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the Uniform Information Density Principle (Jaeger 2010) on adjectival data as regards the variation between retaining and omitting the complementizer that in English adjectival complementation constructions. More specifically, the study tests the effect of different factors of potential importance on this variation across extraposed (e.g. It was inevitable (that) he should be nicknamed 'the Ferret') and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I'm happy (that) we are married). While both the factors concerned with the Complexity Principle and the Uniform Information Density Principle are found to have an effect on post-predicate clauses, less clear effects are found concerning extraposed clauses. I attribute these findings to the difference between the two constructions in terms of their frequency of co-occurrence with different matrix subject types and with different adjectives.

The grammaticalization of I think has received considerable attention in recent years (Thompson & Mulac, 1991; Kaltenböck, 2011; Van Bogaert, 2011). However, far less attention has been paid to the related epistemic marker I’m sure, despite the fact that this construction has been shown to exhibit similar behavior (Kaatari, forthcoming). The present study aims to investigate the degree to which I’m sure is on the same grammaticalization trajectory as I think, as explained below.

Following Traugott & Heine (1991), we view grammaticalization as both a diachronic and a synchronic phenomenon to be studied “at a synchronically segmented moment in time” (Traugott & Heine, 1991:1). In addition to a propensity for that-omission in clause-initial position, one of the main arguments put forth to support the claim that I think is grammaticalized is that it has developed an ability to occur in clause-medial (1) and clause-final position (2), that is outside its canonical clause-initial position (3) (Thompson & Mulac, 1991). Contrary to Hooper’s (1975) claim, a recent empirical study on I’m sure has indicated increased flexibility in this respect, as exemplified below (Kaatari, forthcoming).

(1)  He is, I think/I’m sure, an interesting person.

(2)  He is an interesting person, I think/I’m sure.

(3)  I think/I’m sure (that) he is an interesting person.

Nonetheless, the question remains whether the development of the two constructions can be accounted for in the same way, despite the fact that these constructions have different frequency entrenchment and that the predicates belong to two different word classes.

The aim of the present study is to investigate whether I’m sure follows the same grammaticalization trajectory as I think. The research questions are as follows (see Lehmann, 1985:303, for a discussion of the methodological parameters of grammaticalization used):

• What is the frequency distribution across the clausal positions (syntagmatic variability)?
• To what extent is the complementizer that omitted (paradigmatic variability)?
• Are there any differences across time such that the development of I’m sure could be considered to mirror that of I think?

The study uses comparable subsets from the spoken component of the BNC (Burnard, 2007; Lee, 2001) and the newly compiled Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al., 2017). The results show that I think and I’m sure exhibit remarkable similarity, especially in the most recent data, not only in terms of their proportional distribution across clausal position, but also in terms of their propensity for that-omission. Even though the time span covered is relatively short, a clear increase of that-omission can be noted for I’m sure, for which the frequency increased from 93 to 98 percent, thus mirroring the frequencies for I think (99 percent) very closely. In order to reconcile the fact that I think and I’m sure thus exhibit similar behavior, despite differences in frequency entrenchment, we argue that both constructions are part of the same constructional grammaticalization schema in which the frequency of I think seems to reinforce the grammaticalization of both I think and I’m sure.

This study investigates whether I’m sure seems to be on the same grammaticalisation trajectory as I think. It does so by tracking the frequency of these two constructions over time to explore (i) their distribution across clausal positions (syntagmatic variability) and (ii) the extent to which the complementiser that is omitted (paradigmatic variability). The study uses spoken data from the BNC and the newly compiled Spoken BNC2014. The results show that the two constructions exhibit remarkable similarity, not only in terms of their proportional distribution across clausal positions, but also in terms of their propensity for that-omission. For example, both constructions show adverb-like behaviour with regard to clausal positions. Furthermore, even though the time span covered is relatively short, a clear increase in that-omission was noted for I’m sure, mirroring the frequencies for I think very closely. It thus seems that I’m sure is on the same path as I think, despite differences in frequency entrenchment