<p>Abstract</p><p>It is unclear how L2 students acquire vocabulary – how is it taught – or wheather it can even be taught. In an SSL (Swedish as second language) program for young adults the ambition has been to integrate the L2 students’ into the national high school (gymnasium) courses as quickly as possible, in order to meet the students’ demands for subject education and to challenge them on an appropriate knowledge level. Teachers noticed quite early that the course – integrated L2 students seemed to have a deeper understanding of words and an easier flow in their speech. The study was conducted to map and learn more about the differences in vocabulary with L2 students who were integrated in the national L1 programs in several subjects and L2 students who have chosen to focus, in an isolated group, on SSL only. How does the students’ vocabulary evolve in relation to time? The study is based on the vocabulary knowledge scale as the methodological tool and Stephen Krashen’s monitor model as the theoretical practice, and in particular the input hypothesis and the hypothesis of acquisition and learning in combination with Pauline Gibbons’s methodologies in scaffolding. In the study the test results of eight SSL students are compared; four of the students have chosen to integrate with the L1 classes and four of them have chosen not to integrate with the L1 students. We will show that students that participate in national “high school” courses on the same premises as the L1 students will, through exposure to vocabulary in text books, lectures and post scaffolding, learn their vocabulary at a faster and higher rate than students who focus on the structural functions and, often non-contextual, vocabulary training alone.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p><p>IT-Outsourcing is a concept that describes the supply of part or all of Information Technology (IT) services by an external supplier company, known as IT-vendor, to a client company. The ‘IS-Improvement’ is one of the three strategic views of IT-Outsourcing for clients and involves advantages like focusing on core business, cost reductions and increase of IT-resources efficiency.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Objectives</strong></p><p>The purpose of this project is to discover, describe and analyze the most critical aspects in implementing IT-Outsourcing and the critical aspects of the ‘IS Improvement’ view of IT-Outsourcing for clients, to further let IT-vendors know how they can improve on delivering their services to their customers.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Research Question</strong></p><p>“<em>Which are the most critical factors </em><em>in implementing IT-Outsourcing and which are the critical aspects of the IS-improvement view of IT-Outsourcing for four organizations as clients?</em>”</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Method</strong></p><p>This project follows an exploratory research method. It is mainly an action research but there is also an element of a realist research. The subject of IT-Outsourcing was chosen because it is part of IT-Management. The analysis is based on primary data collected from four organizations in the European Union (EU) that were chosen because they use IT intensively in their activities. Access to these organizations was because of convenience since it was enabled by personal contacts. Two organizations were in the shipping business, the third organization was an electronic-devices factory, and the fourth was a university. The data collection was based on three face-to-face interviews with the IT-Managers of the organizations, and one response was collected by electronic means since the fourth respondent (also IT-Manager) completed and sent the questionnaire by e-mail. The interviews were based on a semi-structured questionnaire, that in turn was formed based on the content of the critical literature review. The critical literature review was formed from books and articles found at Mälardalens Högskola’s library and databases, and interlibrary loans. The data were inserted in a table for content analysis that helped count the frequencies of the various factors of IT-Outsourcing. The results were drawn based on qualitative analysis and they were tested against dialectical critique.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Conclusions</strong></p><p>The most critical factors in implementing IT-outsourcing for these four organizations are: Hardware maintenance is the most critical area to be outsourced. Low costs of services, supplier’s stability and reputation are the most critical factors in selecting an IT-vendor. Supplier’s understanding of client’s objectives is the most critical factor for a successful relationship between clients and IT-vendors. Precise definition of costs is the most critical factor to be included in an IT-Outsourcing contract, and selective/partial IT-Outsourcing is the IT-sourcing solution preferred by these organizations. The ‘IS-Improvement’ view of IT-Outsourcing for these four organizations is not valid, but the respondents’ words indicate ways that IT-Outsourcing can be improved to achieve increased IT-resources efficiency.</p>

In recent years, video games have exploded in popularity and the sales of many popular video games now rival Hollywood blockbusters for revenue. While traditionally used as a medium for entertainment, researchers have also recently begun to explore their potential as learning resources. Many educational games have been created in an attempt to combine entertainment with education, but very little research has been done exploring the potential benefits that commercial online video games can have on language learning. This descriptive study is designed to examine whether or not an off-the-shelf (OTS) Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) - World of Warcraft, can act as a medium for language acquisition. Specifically, it examines whether intermediate-level English language learners’ written accuracy, fluency, and lexical complexity can increase through its play, and what the participants’ perceptions of using an MMOG as a language learning resource are. Participants consisted of four intermediate-level adult English language learners and four English as first language (EL1) speakers. Each English language learner was randomly paired with an EL1 speaker and played the MMOG World of Warcraft over a span of four weeks. The participants’ chat transcripts, along with semi-structured questionnaires, and interviews, were used to gather in-depth data from the participants. The participants’ chat logs were analyzed for improvement in the areas of accuracy, fluency, and lexical complexity by comparing the first and last 25% of their exchanges with the EL1 speakers. Two of the four participants showed some improvement in all three areas that were analyzed, while the remaining two participants showed some improvement in one or two of the three language areas. Results from the questionnaires and interviews indicated that all of the participants felt that playing the game with the EL1 speaker contributed positively to their English language skills and provided a positive learning environment. These results contribute to the growing body of research on MMOGs and give credence to the argument that video games do not have to be solely considered as a source of entertainment, but that they can also be useful as pedagogical tools. / Graduate

There has been a strong advocacy of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in China since the 1980s. One underlying assumption behind this approach is that acquisition is a process which depends on conversational interaction (Wagner-Gough & Hatch, 1975). A specific kind of interaction, meaning negotiation, which “includes routines or exchanges that involve indications of non-understandings and subsequent negotiations of meaning” (Gass & Varonis, 1991, p. 127) has long been considered to be a key factor in L2 development research. From the interactionist perspective, the facilitative role of meaning negotiation in L2 learning is that it provides comprehensible input, and elicits corrective feedback, helps learners to produce comprehensible output, and has the potential to draw learners’ attention to non-target-like aspects of language output. However, recognising the growing role of synchronous computer-medicated communication (SCMC) in language learning, how EFL learners negotiate meaning and whether the claim of the interactionist approach still holds true in this new medium needs further investigation. Moreover, considering the complexity of tasks used in eliciting meaning negotiation and the SCMC involved in negotiating meaning, the exclusively cognitive approach applied by previous studies seems insufficient to explain the meaning negotiation elaborated. For instance, considering the Chinese culture of learning, some Chinese students may be reluctant to produce negotiated interaction. Also, little research has been carried out to investigate the effect of social factors, such as the context and relationship between interlocutors, in generating meaning negotiation. Furthermore, there is little conclusive evidence in previous research regarding the effects of tasks on the quality and quantity of meaning negotiation. This case study investigated 48 EFL students studying mechanical engineering in a Chinese university. Using the variationist perspective on the interaction approach, this study aimed to investigate the features of learners’ negotiated interaction during task-based SCMC, and their similarities and differences with face-to-face negotiated interaction, based on the Varonis and Gass model. Moreover, it also investigates the relationship between task (i.e., task type and task content) and meaning negotiation (i.e., quality and quantity), and the perceived benefits and difficulties of the use of paired task-based SCMC interaction. Also, as previous studies have neglected the individual differences and social factors, the last aim was to investigate how the social and cognitive factors were inextricably intertwined by studying the participants’ perceptions and their actual performances. The main results of the study indicate a low ratio of negotiated turns in paired task-based SCMC interaction due both to linguistic and social factors. Moreover, task did have an influence on the meaning negotiation generated. However, the five-task typology (Pica et al., 1993) applied by most previous studies investigating meaning negotiation cannot fully explain the influence of task on meaning negotiation in peer-peer SCMC context. Apart from the two recurrent features in task definitions, “interactional activity” and “communication goal”, “task complexity” and “task difficulty” (Robinson, 2003) are also influential factors. Overall, this study argues that task, SCMC, the relationship between interlocutors and the learners themselves are all factors which can influence learners’ generation of meaning negotiation. Both personal information and learning contexts have the potential to shape not only the quantity and quality of meaning negotiation but also the attention to the interaction and further influence the production of learners’ language.

Specifically oriented towards Russian culture, this study addresses the need in diplomacy for deeper cultural understanding. As research suggests a link between the inclusion of religious perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) and student motivation and cultural empathy, this study examines how Russian language classrooms could leverage an understanding of Russian religious themes to foster cultural sensitivity. The study invited 24 second-year university students of Russian to complete a previously-validated assessment of cultural sensitivity: the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI). Divided into a control and a treatment group, the participants also watched a short video depicting a story from Russian history on the interactive video platform, Ayamel. The control group viewed a set of 10 extra-textual annotations containing Russian cultural material highlighting secular themes from Russian culture, while the treatment group reviewed 10 that were more spiritually-themed. After viewing the respective annotations, participants completed a short, open-ended, Video Response Questionnaire (VRQ), and completed a GPI post-test. The findings from the VRQ suggested that the video intervention tended to challenge participants' previous perceptions of Russia, noted a general increase in positive, self-reported perspectives of Russian culture, and revealed a tendency in the treatment group to more often portray Russia as a multi-faceted, rather than monolithic, cultural entity. The comparison of the GPI pre-test and post-test scores revealed an inverse interaction between the collective scores of the control and treatment groups on two questions gauging affective responses to culture. For each of these questions on the post-test, the treatment group's collective score slightly increased and the control group's collective score slightly fell.The findings suggest that interaction with religious themes in SLA may promote feelings of commonality and empathy with a foreign culture. As the relative, religious homogeneity of the sample constitutes a threat to the external validity of this study, the researchers invite similar tests to be conducted in SLA among different population types.

The number one highest growth-limiting factor in Swedish forests is nitrogen, because of that fertilization often gives a significant growth increase, wherever you are in Sweden. Specific leaf area (SLA) can be used as a standard measurement of how much resources a tre has to use to build up light absorbing leaf area of needles/leaves. Since there is a strong linear relationship between tree growth and leaf area, there should also be a clear correlation between each leaf area of single trees and its diameter, basal area and volume growth (Xiao, 2005).The datamaterial for the study was collected at the forest estate, Toftaholm, near Ljungby in Kronoberg County (57 ° 0´N; 14 ° 3`E). Data were collected from birches growing in both in fertilized and unfertilized young stands of Birch during the growing season of 2018. The biomass sampling occured in May, July and August. At each occasion, samples were taken from 40 birches (a total of 120 samples were collected).The average value of SLA for all samples on the fertilized treatment was 17.33 m² / kg and 16.41 m² / kg for the non-fertilized treatment (Figure 4). The significance analysis obtained a p-value of 0.019 (Table 2), which confirms that there is a significant difference between the fertilized and the unfertilized treatment.In the significance analysis, it could be concluded that with a 95% probability, there is a significant difference between the comparison of all samples from the fertilized (G) and non-fertilized (OG) treatment.

The two glides w and j exist in both English and Korean. In English, these two glides form syllable-initial glide-vowel (GV) sequences with any of the following twelve vowels (i, ɪ, eɪ, ɛ, ʌ, ə, œ, u, ʊ, oʊ, ɔ, a). In Korean, assuming seven monophthongs (i, e, ə, ɨ, u, o, a), fourteen GV sequences are logically possible, but only nine occur; the following five GV sequences are absent: *ji, *jɨ, *wu, *wɨ, *wo. Researchers who have proposed phonological explanations for this gap unanimously point to the homorganicity between the two segments in these absent sequences. In English, however, homorganicity seems to be disregarded; five GV sequences--GV[HO] sequences--consist of homorganic segments: wu, ji, wʊ, jɪ, wo. This difference in phonotactics between the two languages constitutes the source of difficulty for Korean ESL learners in mastering the L2 glides and GV[HO] sequences. In this study, I first provide detailed phonological and phonetic characterizations of glides. I review phonological representations of glides, as well as corresponding high vowels. Then, I perform a series of acoustic analyses of a set of production data collected from Korean and English monolingual speakers. The acoustic parameters under analysis include the first three formants (F1-F3) and the duration of the glide steady state and the glide-to-vowel transition. These analyses reveal that the F2 of English [w] is consistently lower than that of any of the twelve vowels, while the F2 of Korean [w] depends significantly on the quality of the following vowel. Also, English glides exhibit considerably longer steady state durations compared to Korean glides. Next, I analyze the learners' production data, collected from twenty-two Korean ESL learners. The L2 data reveal that the learners resorted to a few major repair strategies for target GV[HO] sequences, while the vast majority of the non-homorganic GV sequences (GV[N-HO]) are produced target-appropriately. Among these repair strategies, 79% were glide deletion (wound → [und]/[ʔund]), 20% vowel shift (wound → [wənd]), and 1% glide shift (yip → [wɪp]). Interestingly, however, in their L2 glides, many of the learners showed a departure from monolingual Korean glides in the F2 of [w] and the duration of the steady state. Lastly, an Optimality Theoretic account is proposed for the learners' L2 data. Under the assumption that GV[HO] sequences are marked relative to GV[N-HO] sequences (Kawasaki 1982), I argue that learning English GV[HO] sequences by Korean ESL learners involves constraint reranking, crucially, demotion of a set of markedness constraints below a set of competing faithfulness constraints.

This thesis examined the factors of L1, input frequency and emergent productivity in child L2 acquisition. This thesis is the first study to look at the interplay of L1 and usage factors in children learning a L2. The focus of the thesis was an investigation of these factors in the acquisition of article and auxiliary systems of English, which have been proven to be problematic areas for both L1 and L2 learners. While accounts of L1 transfer in L2 are better developed in generative theory, the roles of input frequency and emergent productivity are better developed in constructivist theory. The thesis assessed these two approaches against the data from L2 children from various L1 backgrounds. The children’s accuracy and error patterns with articles and auxiliaries were investigated. The main findings were as follows. L1 typology facilitated the acquisition of the structure of the NP and VP, but it only extended as far as the awareness of the presence of the functional morpheme (article or auxiliary). L1 transfer effects were observed only in the first 1.5 years of acquisition, which could be due to the unstable L1 knowledge in child L2 learners. The use of articles and auxiliaries was also influenced by their input frequencies and distribution, as more frequent forms were supplied more accurately and were substituted for less frequent forms. Different forms of articles and auxiliaries emerged separately and followed different paths of development. It was argued that they were acquired piecemeal and that productivity with these forms emerged gradually. It was concluded that constructionist theories were better supported by the data, since the findings on input frequency and productivity were not compatible with the generative approach, and L1 transfer was incorporated into the constructionist approach to account for the findings. It was argued that by the onset of acquisition, child L2 learners had established constructions in their L1 that were abstract enough to be transferred to L2 and did not rely on lexically specific information. As all children learned specific morphological forms of L2 piecemeal, in doing so they demonstrated input effects that held across all L1 backgrounds.

Denna uppsats syftar till att utreda, precisera och analysera innehållet i den förhållandevis okända kontraktstypen outsourcingavtal. Det faktum att outsourcing idag är en vanligt förekommande transaktion gör det både möjligt och angeläget att fånga de gemensamma dragen i outsourcingavtal. Undersökningar visar också att långt ifrån alla som begagnar sig av outsourcing är nöjda med det avtal som reglerar deras affär. Den rättsvetenskapliga ansatsen är därför att belysa denna avtalstyp på samma sätt som mer konventionella avtalstyper, som exempelvis köpavtal, entreprenadavtal och hyresavtal men också mer moderna avtalstyper som franchising och leasing, har behandlats inom doktrinen.

Sandvik IT Services (SITS) ambition is to provide a smooth and suitable IT environment for the whole Sandvik organization. The idea is that SITS should provide end-to-end solutions globally in an efficient manner. To ensure that they can provide this, they have to be efficient in their work. To handle problems regarding incident and support, they have a large TV screen that shows important information about different processes. The demand for the information has increased; therefore the information displayed on the screen has also increased. Today, the amount of information on the screen is too big and it makes the information difficult to read and absorb. This work will help make SITS application management more effective in the future. Through Workshops for both managers and developers, it is necessary to find out the difference of what SITS requires to diversify priority information. And also be able to view the information in a user-friendly way, a layout of the information is suggested. The result of this work is to produce a design proposal.