This study intended to investigate the language learning strategies used by learners of English as a foreign language, aiming to find the amount of strategies and the domain differences of the strategies used / to reveal the link between strategy use and success levels / and to find out the difference in strategy use between genders and its influence on their achievement in English. 257 (153 male, 104 female) students from Atilim University English Preparatory School participated in the study. At the time of the study all the participants were in the same proficiency level, and were distributed to different classes of the same level. The data were gathered through strategy inventory for language learning (SILL) of Oxford (1990), which was translated to Turkish by Cesur and Fer (2007). The instrument, based on Oxford&rsquo / s (1990) classification of the language learning strategies, is composed of 50 items in six subscales. The participants responded to the inventory before the end of the level they were in. The data were analyzed through SPSS (15.0) to find the relationship of language learning strategies, gender and achievement in learning the target language. To reveal the interconnections between these factors, independent t-tests and an ANOVA test, along with post hoc procedures were performed on the gathered data. The findings of the study revealed that use of language learning strategies are positively effective in success in English, that females were significantly more successful than males in terms of achievement tests, and that they used more language learning strategies in learning English. Depending on the statistical results, it is discovered that there is a significant connection between gender, language learning strategies and achievement in English.

The Internet is increasingly becoming a key medium through which people establish social contacts and form interpersonal relationships. In particular, online dating websites are gaining popularity and rapidly expanding around the world. This study explores the discourse that constitutes the practices of the deai-kee-saito 'encounter-oriented sites' in Japanese, as observed in three major personal ad websites, namely 1) Ekisaito furenzu 'Excite Friends', 2) Match.com, and 3) Yahoo!Japan paasonaruzu 'Yahoo!Japan Personals'. It focuses on the ways that self-advertisers express their socio-sexual desires and describe their ideal partners and relationships, and analyzes them with respect to the reproduction of social asymmetries.More specifically, it examines the discursive construction of the kinds of personae (personality characteristics) and bodies (physical features) that advertisers aged 20-29 wish in their future partners, as well as the kinds of practices (activities and actions) they wish to engage in with their partners, what they wish to do for their partners, and/or wish the partners to do for them in their envisioned interactions. Out of the 1200 ads collected from these websites, a total of 463 ads are identified as target-gender-explicit and analyzed at lexical, morphosyntactic, phrasal, clausal, sentential and discourse levels. It pays close attention to the linguistic resources utilized in the articulation of socio-sexual desires and desirability, and the textual formation of the addresser(advertiser)-addressee(ad reader) relationships, including adjectives, nouns, verbal phrases, person references, desideratives, conditionals, and the formula yoroshiku/o-negai shimasu 'Thank you in advance'. It also analyzes para-linguistic resources, such as emoticons, symbols, and unique use of hiragana/katakana syllabaries. These discursive processes involve prioritization, or hierarchization, of personal attributes and consequently of the owners of those attributes. It argues that socio-sexual desirability is reflective of the hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality in today's Japanese-speaking communities.In addition, it examines explicit and implicit language related to race, class, and similar constructs. It also investigates the functions of style-shift that advertisers use in expressing desire. This study shows that individuals' 'innocuous' expression of socio-sexual desires through personal ads is a locus for the reproduction and contestation of the hegemonic order of gender, sexuality, race and class.

The aim of this study was to analyze and compare the use of the verbal hedge "you know" in the spontaneous speech of women and drag queens to compare for instances of certainty and uncertainty as described by Holmes (1986). For the data, episodes of the reality shows RuPaul’s Drag Race Untucked which airs on Logo TV and The Real Housewives of Orange County which airs on Bravo TV were manually transcribed by the conventions of written speech. The use of "you know" was then analyzed by function and context. In the results of this study, the women used "you know" to express uncertainty more often than the drag queens, except not in the way Lakoff (2004) described as being an aspect of "women’s language." The drag queens used "you know" more often to express certainty. However, when used to express uncertainty its use by the drag queens was more relevant to "women’s language" as described by Lakoff (2004) or an exaggerated performance of femininity.

Jenny Cheshire, current editor in chief of Language in Society, stated that there is a bias of masculine terms and referents in the English language (1985, p. 22). This poses a problem, both linguistically and socially, and conscious language reforms need to be imposed in order for the bias to drastically be countered (1985, p. 22). In the past decades, gender-neutral terms, such as chairperson has been gaining ground in English, particularly in business discourse, and are contributing to create a more gender-neutral language. According to Cheshire (2008), media discourse is enormously influential (p.9) in the way we communicate, and this study investigates patterns in the use of chairperson and salesperson, as well as historically male professions priest and manager and female professions nurse and secretary. The data for this study is taken from the TIME Magazine Corpus. The results of this study show that masculine gender collocates appear commonly with the historically female professions and conversely for the historically male professions which appear more often with feminine collocates. Furthermore, through analysis of 1,000 instances of the terms in the corpus, it is noted that there are differences as to how the professions are connected with other words as well. Sexuality, nationality and physicality are ways in which the collocates of the terms differ. It is noted that, over time, there have been both increases and decreases in how gender collocates appear with the terms and that the frequency in usage of the feminine, masculine and gender-neutral terms have all been noted to vary in usage over the past century in the selected discourse.

Once women were the pioneers within the tech industry, but during the last decades the amount of women who choose a career within computer science has decreased rapidly. Programming languages have evolved during the last decades and because of the growing gender gap in the industry, they have done so involuntarily in the absence of women. The imbalance raises the question if the tech industry and the programming languages have been adapted for a more masculine way of developing software. A quantitative study and a literature review evaluates if there is a need for a computerlanguage developed towards women. The study comes to the conclusion that there is no need for a female inspired computer language, but the way computer languages are taught suits the male way of thinking better than the female way.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the relation between gender and humour is maintained and challenged in the Swedish TV show Parlamentet. Using an interactional approach based on Judith Baxter’s theoretical framework for feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, the study focuses on how communicative strategies are used in negotiating for the ideal position of “the successful comedian”. This position is seen as an ideal position in Parlamentet, where comedians do political parody. In the conversation sequences examined in this study, both verbal and bodily semiotic modes have been analyzed using conversation analysis and multimodal analysis. The study focuses on how different communicative strategies encourage or reject the comedians and how this leads to different possibilities in negotiating for a powerful position, the position of the successful comedian. Humour is culturally seen as a male-coded discourse. The relations between humour and gender that are in focus are the hegemonic notions of women as lacking a sense of humour or being less humorous than men. The notions of gender are based on Judith Butler’s theories and hence seen as something performed through discourse and within a rigid regulatory frame where the subject’s possibilities are not infinite. The results of the study show that the female and male comedians do not have the same possibilities in the negotiation for the position of “the successful comedian”. The male comedians are strongly encouraged to a greater extent than the female comedians. The female comedians are also rejected to a larger extent than the male comedians. The male comedians are mostly rejected by the moderator whereas the female comedians are rejected by the moderator, male comedians and female comedians. The female comedians encourage other comedians to a larger degree than the male comedians. A significant finding of this study is that the relations between humour and gender, where women are seen as less humorous than men, are maintained when female comedians through discourse are made less humorous. However, there are strategies in the interaction that do encourage the female comedians or that lead to female comedian’s resist being rejected. These strategies indicate that the hegemonic cultural notions of women as less humorous than men are also challenged in this public discourse.

De senaste decennierna har utbudet av matlagningsprogram och kokböcker ökat dramatiskt, samtidigt som samhället blivit allt mer jämställt. Trots detta är de professionella köken fortsatt kraftigt mansdominerade platser som kvinnor aktivt exkluderas ifrån. Föreliggande studie utforskar därför, ur ett genusperspektiv, hur två vinnare av Sveriges Mästerkock konstrueras i sina kokböcker. Analysen utförs inom ramen för den kritiska diskursanalysen och utgår från en socialkonstruktivistisk syn på språk och makt. Studien intar även en feministisk ansats där Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystemet är den huvudsakliga utgångspunkten för förståelsen av samhällets förmåga att reproducera könsnormer. Materialet består av Erik Hammars bok Min franska matresa och Klara Linds bok Sydamerika – min matpassion som ges ut av Bonnier Fakta. Syftet är att undersöka hur Klara och Erik konstrueras i sina kokböcker och om böckerna bidrar till att upprätthålla dikotomin mellan det manliga och kvinnliga köket. För att åstadkomma detta används kvantitativa metoder från den systemisk funktionella grammatiken i kombination med kvantitativ innehållsanalys.Resultatet visar att Erik konstrueras som en aktiv, framgångsrik kock till skillnad från Klara som framställs som mer passiv och familjeorienterad. Förekomsten av teman skiljer sig markant böckerna emellan där Eriks bok främst refererar till tävlingsprogrammet och franska rätter och tekniker vilket inte sker i Klaras fall. Detta bidrar tillsammans till att böckerna bidrar till att reproducera dikotomin mellan det manliga och kvinnliga köket.

This thesis is based on a conversation about gender identity and the pronoun hen in an episode of the radio programme Tendens on Swedish public radio, P1. The participants of the conversation are a scholar and a journalist/show-host. The goal of the research has been to analyse how the conversation is constructed from its context and which topics that occur. The goal of the research has also been to analyse how the participants of the conversation position themselves and how the conversation composes and re-composes norms and values regarding gender identity in society. Critical discourse analysis, completed by Conversation analysis has been the theoretical and methodological approach. The result shows that the conversation functions well within its context and that the host Söderqvist and scholar Milles undertakedifferent parts and contributions in the interaction. The host undertakes the part as the presenter and questioner of problems and topics, which Milles then refute in her role as an expert. The result also shows that Söderqvist and Milles give voice to a diversity of topical and interactional positionings in the conversation, but that Söderqvist mainly positions himself as the audience’s representative. Furthermore the result shows that the participants recreate gender identity norms in the conversation. Milles dictums also carry tendencies to create and broaden norms.

Denna studie utgår från tre fokusgruppsamtal med sammanlagt tio personer som betraktar sig själva som queera. Syftet har varit att analysera positioneringar i relation till diskurser som konstituerar kön, sexualitet och relationer, och hur dessa positioneringar och diskurser konstrueras språkligt. Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis har använts som teori och metod, kompletterad med en analys utifrån systemisk-funktionell grammatik. Analysen har visat hur deltagarna genomgående konstruerar ett ifrågasättande av normer som organiserar och kategoriserar kön, sexualitet och relationer. Utifrån queer positionering har kön och sexualitet genom agentiva verbprocesser konstruerats som dynamiska och mångfaldiga. Även anti-hierarkiska och feministiska diskurser, tillsammans med en ovilja att definiera sexuell läggning och relationer, genomsyrar samtalen. Vidare har det framgått att queer konstrueras som perspektiv, men även som en praktikgemenskap med gränser för vad och vem som är queer. En analys av diskursers samspel med varandra har synliggjort ämnen som på olika sätt utmanar queers gränser, bland annat könsseparatism, pronomenet hen, pornografi och asexualitet. Analysen har dessutom visat att det queera subjektet rör sig mellan olika positioneringar beroende på kontexten, och att positioneringar kan vara såväl intentionella som påtvingade. Den queera pendlar därmed mellan makt och maktlöshet beroende på relationen till andra individer och diskurser. / This thesis is based on three focus group discussions including a total of ten individuals who consider them selves as being queer. The research aim has been to analyze subject positionings in relation to discourses that constitute gender, sexuality and relationships, and how these positionings and discourses are linguistically produced. Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis, complemented by a systemic-functional grammar analysis, has been the theoretical and methodological approach. The result has shown how the participants consistently position them selves against norms that organizes and categorizes gender, sexuality and relationships. The participants have from queer positionings as agents in verb processes articulated sexuality and gender as dynamic and multiplex. They have also drawn on anti-hierarchical and feminist discourses, as well as articulated a resistance to define sexual orientation and relationships. Queer has been produced as a perspective, but also as a community of practice with it's own norms for what and who can be considered as queer. An analysis of interaction among discourses has exposed issues that challenge the borders of queer, for example gender separatism, gender neutral pronouns, pornography and asexuality. The analysis has furthermore shown that the queer subject move amongst different positionings depending on the context, and that positionings can be intentional as well as imposed. The queer individual is therefore oscillating between power and powerlessness depending on the relationship to other individuals and discourses.

This thesis examines conceptions of gender revealed by people when assessing texts. The research questions are: What associations can be discerned between gender conceptions and ideas about the quality of texts? What features of content and style are perceived as female or male? The study seeks to develop a method for comparing different people’s assessments of the same text. The material was collected by means of questionnaires in which 114 informants were asked to assess three anonymous student texts and then guess the sex of the writer. The material has been analysed quantitatively by correlating the assessments of the texts with the guesses about the sex of the author, and qualitatively, as the informants’ freely worded assessments of the texts were analysed for content and form with the support of assumptions about how assessments are expressed in text. The result shows that the assessments do not significantly correlate with assumptions about the sex of the writer, although there is a tendency to regard textual flow as feminine. Informants rarely bring up gender spontaneously when assessing texts. The properties of a writer that are mentioned are instead intellectual capacity, ambitions, social background and self-confidence. But when informants are asked to guess the sex of the author and state reasons for their answers, dichotomous stereotypes appear, such as that men’s texts are characterized by individualism, a focus on facts, self-confidence, simplicity, and slovenly and terse language, whereas women are assumed to write altruistically, focusing on experiences, with care and complexity, and in a polished and narrative style. This thesis argues that writing is increasingly perceived as a female domain, and discusses the results of text assessment on the basis of Nicky Le Feuvre’s (2009) theories of the effect of feminization processes on the gender order.