This study investigated the relationship between emotional intelligence and selfesteem on undergraduate college students' academic involvement and career preparation. In addition, the effects of emotional intelligence and self-esteem on problem-solving skills and group skills were also examined. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between the different variables. The survey instrument employed had been previously tested and reliability tests were run to ensure alpha levels were appropriate A sample of 292 undergraduate college students voluntarily completed surveys that measured emotional intelligence, self-esteem, academic involvement, group skills, problem-solving skills, and career goals. Data was collected from four different academic institutions in Northern California-two community colleges, and two universities. Consistent with hypotheses, it was found that emotional intelligence and selfesteem were both positively correlated to academic involvement (defined as participation in academic activities) and career preparation (defined as career orientation) .. Both emotional intelligence and self-esteem were significant predictors of academic involvement and career preparation.

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Writers, editors, and everyday language users look to dictionaries, style guides, usage guides, and other published works to help inform their language decisions. They want to know what is Standard English and what is not. Commentators have been prescribing and proscribing certain usages for centuries; however, their advice has traditionally been based on the subjective opinions of the authors. Recent works have analyzed usage by relying wholly or partly on statistical and descriptive data rather than traditional opinion alone; however, no work has presented statistical usage data in a user-friendly and consistent format. This study presents a statistically based methodology for analyzing the standardness of disputed English usage points that can be presented in a dictionary-like format useful to writers and editors. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study determined the percent of use of several disputed usage items. Percents of use were then applied to a statistically based "standardness" scale with several levels. The scale presented in this study is adapted from scales that have been used previously to study language change. In addition, returns from the Corpus of Historical American English were used to present historical trends, if any, for each usage item. It was found that traditional sentiments about certain prescribed and proscribed usage items differ markedly from actual observed usage. Corpus data make it clear that even usage guides that purport to rely at least partly on descriptive data are often wrong about the prevalence and acceptability of usage items. To produce truly objective and accurate analysis, usage advice must depend on corpus data and use a standard usage-trend scale that accounts for how language changes.

Dictionaries and, to a lesser extent, usage guides provide writers, editors, and users of American English information on how to use the language appropriately. Dictionaries, in particular, hold authority over correct usage of words. However, historically, usage guides and dictionaries were created using the knowledge of a small group of people. Lexicographers like Noah Webster set out to prescribe a proper way of using American English. To make these judgments, they often relied on a combination of study and idiosyncratic intuitions. A similar process took place in creating usage guides. Though these manuals profess to explain how the language is used by American English speakers-or rather by the selected group of speakers deemed "standard" by usage guide editors and lexicographers-ultimately the manuals can only express the perspectives of the editors and lexicographers on this language. Historically, the views of these editors and lexicographers were the best tools available to assess language, but now computer-based corpora allow for studying larger swaths of language usage. This study examines how much dictionaries and usage guides agree with real-world usage found in corpus data. Using the Corpus of Historical American English, a set of dictionaries and usage guides published throughout the last two hundred years were analyzed to see how much agreement they had with corpus data in noting the addition of denominal verbs (i.e., verbs formed by the conversion of nouns as in 'They taped together the box.') in American English usage. It was found that the majority of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs before corpus data reflected accepted usage of these verbs. However, about a quarter of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs concurrently with the corpus data. These results suggest that dictionaries-and the subjective opinions of the lexicographers that created them-are more aligned with real-world usage than would be expected. Because of sparse listings, results for usage guide agreement was inconclusive.

In the present study, teaching guides to The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S Lewis are assessed and evaluated with the help from Ian McGrath’s Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. The study focuses on two complete teaching guides, one developed by an American language teacher and the other by the producers of the latest Narniamovie. Both of the guides were originally created for a native speaker context. However, in this dissertation ways of adapting these study guides to the goals expressed in the Swedish Curriculum (Lpo 94) and The National Syllabuses are explored. The result of my evaluation shows that both the selected guides are, with some adjustment, applicable to the education of English in Sweden. The conclusion is that the language-oriented parts of the teaching guides are valid to the Swedish curriculum and syllabuses of English, though they were developed for native speakers of English. The modules on moral education are also applicable, since value based education is fundamental in Swedish schools.

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guidescover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world. At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computertechnologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesisexamines the state of the art in field guides for plants. First, a framework isestablished for evaluating both printed and digital field guides. Second, fourprint and three digital field guides are evaluated against the criteria. Third, anovel digital field guide is presented and evaluated.

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