<p>The Emancipation of Celie: The Color Purple as a womanist Bildungsroman</p><p>The purpose of this essay is to study The Color Purple as a Bildungsroman, focusing on the development of the protagonist, Celie. The Color Purple is related to both the traditional Bildungsroman and to the female Bildungsroman, but the essay shows that it can also be seen as a womanist Bildungsroman. Initially, Celie believes that being a woman inescapably means that she has to serve and obey men and she is oppressed by patriarchy. She is eventually introduced to another way of living by the strong female characters of Sofia and Shug who embrace her in a kind of sisterhood, which is vital for Celie as she has nothing else to help her liberate herself from the patriarchal values that keep her down. In conclusion, this essay shows how Celie has developed from being a young girl, forced to act in an adult way, into a woman who displays signs of all the criteria for having achieved a womanist development: she is grown up (not just acting as though she is), she is in charge of a business, a house and, in short, her life. She is serious, she has a universalist perspective, and most importantly, she loves. Furthermore, the essay highlights which characteristics of her development can be linked to the traditional and the female Bildungsroman and which characteristics can be seen as typical of a womanist Bildungsroman.</p>

<p>There are mainly two ways of comparing adjectives in English: the analytic and the synthetic. The analytic way is to use more and most (for example difficult, more difficult, most difficult). The synthetic, or inflectional, way is to add the endings –er and –est (for instance fast, faster, fastest). During the last twelve centuries the way of forming comparisons in English has evolved from predominately synthetic to the point where both inflections and analytic forms are used. Today many adjectives are almost always compared either synthetically or analytically (e.g. fast and difficult respectively), but sometimes we have two alternatives; for example, we can choose between more polite and politer. The author has three aims with this paper: firstly, to examine how adjectives in English are compared today; secondly, to determine how well the descriptions in modern grammars agree with authentic written English; thirdly, to see whether there have been any recent changes in the way of indicating comparison. This is a quantitative study. A corpus investigation was undertaken: some one hundred common adjectives in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, from 1990–91 and 2005 that vary in their way of expressing comparison were studied. The results were compared with six grammars from the last five decades. After the data collection, the chi square test was applied, showing how statistically significant the changes between 1990–91 and 2005 are. Judging from the data in this study, the synthetic comparison seems to be becoming less common. The author also concludes that the comparison of adjectives in contemporary British English varies considerably.</p>

<p>This essay is a corpus study, the aim of which is to investigate the usage of two near-synonymous verb pairs that descend from Germanic and Romance languages. The four verbs begin, commence, hate, and detest were chosen for the study. The analysis is based on occurrences of the verbs in five subcorpora in the COBUILDDIRECT corpus; two subcorpora consist of British and American books and three subcorpora are composed of British and Australian newspapers. Occurrences were also collected from the novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë. The primary aims of the essay are to investigate the frequency and occurrence of the verbs in different text types as well as in British and American books, to reveal if the verbs are synonymous and whether they occur with the same collocates. Furthermore, the novel Wuthering Heights gives a diachronic view of the usage of the verbs.</p><p>This analysis suggests that a usage of the verbs of Germanic origin is more frequent than the verbs of Romance origin. The Romance verbs are more common in novels and books, but also in the British newspaper The Times. Furthermore, the usage of commence and detest seems to be restricted to certain contexts which are connected to the field of the English language in which the verbs occurred at first. The Germanic verbs are clearly favoured in all kinds of texts investigated, even though Wuthering Heights has a high number of occurrences of commence.</p><p>On the topic of synonymy, begin and commence have been found to be further apart from each other than hate and detest. This is due to the fact that begin and commence are constructed grammatically different, as well as a restriction in contextual usage of commence. Despite this, commence is used more freely in American books than in British books. The synonymy of hate and detest is connected to the fact that detest expresses a stronger feeling than hate, which makes the two verbs near-synonymous but also gradable. The verbs in the two pairs also collocate with different words, which underlines that they are not real synonyms. These findings support the claim that one should not call the verb pairs synonyms but near-synonyms, and that one has to be careful when choosing a verb.</p>

<p>This paper examines how aesthetic and anthropologic culture is represented in a few selected textbooks for English and to what degree these representations correspond to the aims of the English course syllabi. Regarding aesthetic culture, the emphasis in the syllabi is on the students using literature as means to an end, mainly to develop certain skills such as an understanding of the English language, or learning about anthropologic culture through aesthetic culture. The aesthetic values of literature as an art form are not promoted or encouraged at all. The selected textbooks correspond to the syllabi on this matter. Concerning anthropologic culture, the emphasis in the syllabi is on ‘difference’. Other cultures are presented as strange and distant from us, and this is something that also can be seen in the selected textbooks. Moreover, in one of the textbooks the students are addressed as future tourists, potentially causing them to view other cultures and places as sights to see and sites to visit, instead of as having intrinsic value.</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p>This study is based on empirical studies and the approach to this has been interviews with a group of pupils. The study investigates the use of reading strategies among pupils. The aim is to investigate how the pupils use different reading strategies in order to overcome problems that occur when reading fictional texts. In addition, the pupils were also asked some questions about their reading habits and attitudes towards reading.</p><p>Research has shown that pupils who are introduced to different reading strategies are better readers than those who are not. Reading strategies help the readers make literary texts more comprehensible. As a result of this study, it is shown that there are reading strategies that the pupils are familiar with. These strategies are of importance, since they are part of the pupils’ learning process and help them increase their reading comprehension. They also lead to the fact that the pupils gain and widen their knowledge. However, this investigation has also shown that there are important reading strategies that the pupils did not use in this study. There can be different factors that have affected the outcome of this. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether the pupils are familiar with these strategies or not. Moreover, the pupils argued that they seldom read fiction in school and those times they read, it was literature that they did not like.</p>

<p>This essay deals with subject-verb concord in written compositions by Swedish students at Uppsala University. The essay investigates the possibility that students who continue studying English beyond the A level at the university make fewer errors than students who do not continue.</p><p>In order to minimize the influence of the students’ gender and first language, only essays written by female students were included in the study; in addition, all students included had Swedish as their first language, and so did their parents. 25 essays by students who continued their studies and 25 essays by students who may not have done so were chosen. All 50 essays were examined for both correct and incorrect instances concerning concord between subjects and verbs in the present tense. The primary verbs to be, to do and to have were analysed as well as regular and irregular verbs.</p><p>The results show that the 25 students who continued beyond the A level made fewer errors than the 25 students who may not have continued. The results also indicate that subject-verb concord is not a serious problem for Swedish learners.</p>

<p>The following essay is an analysis of a translation from English into Swedish of two articles concerning tourism, travelling and the environment. The language of the articles is expressive and rich in metaphors, which evokes images in the mind of the reader. The translation was performed with the aim to transfer this effect into the translated texts and the aspects to be examined in the analysis were chosen with this in mind.One of the three aspects to be examined is the use of metaphors and how they are translated into Swedish. Many of the metaphors bear reference to travelling and the environment which gives them a function of enforcing the message and engaging the reader in the text. In order to obtain the same effect in the Swedish translations several translation strategies had to be used.The second aspect to be examined is the terminology used within tourism and the environment.  The environmental concern is a growing trend which inevitably influences the language and requires a new set of useful and understandable terms. This becomes clear when reading and translating the articles at hand. The environmental terms are fairly new and sometimes hard to distinguish. In this study focus is set on the translation strategies and the procedures used in order to find the Swedish equivalents of the terms in this context.The third aspect is the translation of hyphenated pre-modifiers. This aspect is particularly interesting, since the phenomenon is more or less unknown in Swedish. Of the fifteen hyphenated pre-modifiers in the source texts none were translated into hyphenated pre-modifiers in Swedish although five of them were translated into regular pre-modifiers. The analysis is based on the translation strategies applied and the comparison of syntactic structures of the expressions in English and Swedish.</p>

<p>Läroplanen (Lpo94) förespråkar en tidig start i engelska i grundskolan med den kommunikativa inlärningsstilen som fokus. I de lokala ämnesplanerna för den studerade kommunen har lärarna som mål att eleven ska kunna förstå enkla instruktioner och beskrivningar som ges i lugnt tempo och tydligt tal för eleven inom välbekanta områden.</p><p>Syftet med detta arbete är att titta på när engelskundervisningen startar på skolorna i en mindre kommun i södra Sverige. Vi kommer också att titta på vad läraren gör i den tidiga undervisningen, hur de går tillväga och hur lärarnas kompetens i engelska ser ut.</p><p>Frågeställningarna är följande:</p><p>- När börjar lärarna med engelskundervisningen i den undersökta kommunen?</p><p>- Hur genomförs den tidiga engelskundervisningen?</p><p>- Vilken kompetens i engelska har de undervisande lärarna?</p><p>För att besvara dessa frågeställningar gjordes en enkätundersökning på de elva skolorna i kommunen, varav fjorton lärare som undervisar i engelska i grundskolans tidiga skolår besvarade enkäterna. Vi ville även ha djupare inblick i ämnet och genomförde då intervjuer med åtta lärare och två rektorer i samma kommun.</p><p>Resultatet av undersökningen visar att i den undersökta kommunen börjar eleverna med engelska i grundskolans år 1 eller år 2. Eleverna lär sig genom att dramatisera, sjunga och använda sig av muntlig kommunikation. Lärarna använder sig också av konkret material och sagor samt att tio utav de femton undervisande lärarna har högskolepoäng i engelska.</p>

<p>The aim of this study is to examine the vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English among Swedish upper secondary school students. The primary material consists of two vocabulary tests, one collocation test, and a background questionnaire.</p><p>The first research question concerns whether the students who receive a major part of their education in English have a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English than those who are taught primarily in Swedish. The second concerns if the students who started to learn English before the age of 7 have a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English than those who started after 7. The third concerns if the level of the students' vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge correlates. The fourth addresses whether external inputs of English may have had an effect on the students' vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge level.</p><p>The results indicate that reinforcement of English through an education mostly in English has rendered a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge in English. In addition, starting to learn English before age 7 also appeared to have had a positive effect on these levels. In addition, the results suggest that an early onset (before 7) of English compensates for lack of reinforcement of English. Conversely, reinforcement of English compensates for a late onset (after 7) of English. However, the results imply that the combination of an early onset (before 7) of English and reinforcement of English is the most efficient means to achieve a high level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge.</p><p>Moreover, a clear correlation was found between vocabulary knowledge and receptive collocation knowledge, which also points to the importance of a large exposure to English.</p><p>For the high performance students, external influences such as English in primary and secondary school, and a high motivation to learn English may have contributed to a higher language confidence, and possibly a higher level of vocabulary and receptive collocation knowledge.</p><p> </p>

<p>France has long had its foreign audiovisual material dubbed. If this is due to an attempt to conserve the French language, there should also be similar concern with foreign cultural references. This essay uses qualitative analyses of extralinguistic references to discover if a so-called domesticating practice is notable also in French subtitling. Sweden, however, is a smaller country, and may be considered more Americanized culturally. Swedish subtitling is used as the more globalized counterpart.</p><p>This research cites instances in which extralinguistic references are made and how they are subsequently dealt with in the translated subtitles. The instances are singled out and then individually analyzed. Using four categories of translation methods for Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs), this study investigates whether translation norms differ between Swedish and French subtitles.</p><p>This study‘s most important finding is that there do seem to be different norms for Swedish and French subtitles and that the francophone target audience is not required to move so far from its domestic reference frame as is the Swedish target audience.</p><p>Another important finding is that while there are both quantitative and qualitative differences, there are also striking similarities on the statistical level, indicating that there are global norms that govern translation in general, and specifically subtitling.</p><p>The results are interesting for the discussion around which ECRs are domesticated, but also for further sociolinguistic analyses of French domestication.</p>