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The purpose of this essay is to see if billingualism is understood within literature, society and among students and faculty teachers. We took inspiration from theories on billingualism and brought it with us when we carried out interviews with two principals in separate schools and when we conducted our investigation, in the form of questionnaires, in one of the schools. The investigation involved teachers and students in ninth grade. The study is divided into three parts: a theoretical background of what billingualism is; a presentation of the interviews and answers from students and teachers and an analysis of the results that came from the interviews and questionnaires. Our conclusions are that billingualism has a positive influence on human development. Sweden has been considered to be a one-language country, but our study shows to the contrary, that Sweden is definitely a billingual and multicultural country.

This essay deals about bilingualism and lifepaths. The essay is based on a qualitative study, where eight individuales have been interviewed, all of them from Gränsskolan in Haparanda. Before the interview´s a study of relevant research literature was made. The main purpose with the essay, is to study if the informant’s life paths have been affected by their bilingualism, i.e. if the informers moves and education etc. have been affected by theirs bilingualism. The essay also deals with how the informants’ bilingualism have developed and if there is something who has promote to the bilingualism. A plotting program called Geotime has been used to analyse the informers’ life paths. The program was used for time-geographic illustrations. The systematic and the integrative approach is the starting point in the essay´s geographic problem. Time geography is used for analysing the informers life paths. The other theory, the boundary theory is used for to examine how the informers in Haparanda had become bilingual (systematic approach). In order to understand, study and see how the life paths and bilingualism is spatially related to each other in specific environments, an investigation was made to see if there were connection between those, i.e. if moves, jobs and education had been influenced by the informers’ bilingualism (integrative approach). The study shows that the informers had been bilingual for different reasons, their knowledge in Finnish and in Swedish is different. The informers’ life paths look different, four of the informers had a wide pattern of movement. The conclusions are that the informers’ life has in certain ways been influenced by their bilingualism, because some of the informers has had use of both languages, for example at their workplaces. / Denna uppsats handlar om tvåspråkighet och livsbanor. Undersökningen bygger på en kvalitativ studie, där åtta individer har intervjuats, samtliga har gått på Gränsskolan i Haparanda. Innan intervjuerna genomfördes gjordes en litteraturundersökning. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om informanternas livsbanor har påverkats av tvåspråkigheten, dvs. om informanternas flyttningar, arbeten, utbildningar och livet i övrigt har påverkats av deras tvåspråkighet. Det har även gjorts en undersökning om hur informanternas tvåspråkighet har uppkommit och om det fanns något som bidragit till deras tvåspråkighet. Grafritningsprogrammet Geotime har använts för att analysera individernas livsbanor. Programmet används för att man ska kunna skapa tidsgeografiska illustrationer. Den systematiska och den integrativa ansatsen är utgångspunkterna i uppsatsen geografiska problem. Tidsgeografi används för att analysera informanternas livsbanor. Den andra teorin, gränsteori användes för att undersöka hur informanterna i Haparanda blivit tvåspråkiga (systematisk ansats). För att förstå, studera och se hur livsbanor och tvåspråkighet är rumsligt relaterade till varandra i specifika miljöer, undersöktes de om det fanns någon koppling mellan dessa dvs. om flyttningar, arbeten och utbildning hade påverkats av deras tvåspråkighet (integrativ ansats). Studien visar att informanterna har blivit tvåspråkiga av olika faktorer, deras kunskaper i finska och svenska språket är olika. Informanternas livsbanor ser olika ut, fyra av informanterna har ett bredare rörelsemönster/flyttningsmönster. Slutsatserna blir att informanternas liv har till viss del påverkats av tvåspråkigheten, då vissa har haft användning av båda språken bl.a. på deras arbetsplatser.

Two propositions connected by and have the same truth-value, irrespective of the order of the conjuncts. However, in a sentence like “I put my socks and shoes on” it becomes obvious that the order of the conjuncts affects the meaning of the sentence. This study concerns the contribution of pragmatics to and by implicit enrichment to and then or and thus. It includes three experiments that investigate and-enrichment in adults and children. Nine five-line stories concerning everyday events were used. After each story the participants were to respond “yes” or “no” to a statement which referred to two events that occurred in the story, conjoined with and. In the critical statement, the two events were presented in the inverse order to which they had occurred. The results show no general developmental effect but awareness of the task plays a critical role for and-enrichment production. Ten-year-olds enrich and to the same extent as adults when no efforts are made to mask the intention behind the task. However, when a more spontaneous response is captured by masking the purpose of the task children respond more logically. There are no clear evidence that and-enrichment is affected by the cognitive demands of the task.

Since time immemorial, various governments in China have attempted to promulgate writing reforms and speech reforms in order to unite the nation, mostly for political gain. The aim of this paper is to discover and analyze some language issues in the People’s Republic of China, specifically attitudes and comments on spoken usage of Putonghua (also called Modern Standard Chinese), Shanghai dialect, Cantonese and English by researching China Daily’s online newspaper article archive. A few valid articles could be retrieved and they uncovered that Putonghua, Shanghai dialect and Cantonese are all considered prestigious in different regions of the country; furthermore, English is gaining support rapidly, especially in corporate China.

In this paper, relative clauses in King Alfred’s Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care were examined using relative frequency as a tool to determine whether or not certain factors influenced the choice of relativization strategy. These factors include antecedent case, antecedent gender, antecedent number, distance, animacy, noun phrase type, case of relativized NP, and syntactic function. The method involved gathering together all the occurrences of relative clauses using the Old English corpus and a Modern English translation. This process was not unproblematic as the correct translation from Old English to modern English sometimes was left to the discretion of the translator. Some clauses that were initially thought to be relative clauses were, in fact, not relative clauses. The components of each of the clauses were then examined and categorized after any problematic examples were discarded. Relative frequencies for each of the categories were calculated and chi-square tests were performed to check the reliability of the results. The results of this paper were compared to another paper which did somewhat similar research to determine if the findings were consistent although that paper did not look at as many factors as this paper.

The aim of this study was to investigate if there exists a prototypical example of the notion game in two cultures, Sweden and Minnesota, USA, and in that case, if it is the same or if possible similarities are greater within generations, regardless of nationality. A questionnaire asking informants to name, in their eyes, typical games was sent to 48 Americans and 53 Swedes. The informants from each country were divided into age groups. The answers were analyzed and compared in different ways. Five out of six groups showed a great similarity in mentioning the game Monopoly as a typical game. Differences were also found. For example, sports were brought up to a higher degree in Minnesota than in Sweden, and the young groups differed from the other groups in the way that many respondents mentioned Computer games and Video games.

In order to be able to influence the motivation of second language learners one first has to understand what motivation is, what its preconditions are and how to detect it. The research for this essay was done with the help of one hundred and ten students from seven classes in two different upper secondary schools and most of these learners were first year students. The aim was to find and measure the students' motivation to learn English and how this motivation can be influenced in a positive manner. The method used to collect the necessary data was a questionnaire which asked questions about the relevancy of the English course and how frequently the students used English and how interested they were in the language. The results give a clear picture of the students' motivational levels as well as to which parts of the English course they respond and to which they do not.

Flerspråkighet är inget modernt ord, det är ett faktum i vårt samhälle att vi lever i en mångkulturell miljö. Många barn kommer hit från andra länder och placeras in i vår svenska skola med kort varsel, där de förväntas anpassa sig efter alla främmande företeelser och kulturella skillnader som finns. Vi ville se hur man som pedagog utifrån detta planerade och genomförde undervisning som var anpassad till en mångkulturell skola. Därför valde vi att genomföra intervjuer med vissa pedagoger, som är de flerspråkiga barnens närmsta länk i skolan. Genom dem fick vi veta hur komplext pedagogernas arbete är, hur frustrerande det kan vara när språket blir till en barriär för kommunikationen. Hur viktigt det är att barnen får stöd i alla sina språk, för att det lägger grunden för deras framtid och förutsättningar. För att detta ska kunna förverkligas måste pedagoger förstå att deras inställning till flerspråkighet och mångkultur återspeglas i barnen, deras attityder formas utifrån det.

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