<p>This paper examines the distribution of corrective feedback in the Swedish EFL classroom, and the relationship between the context of teacher-student exchanges and the provision of feedback. Corrective feedback was categorized in six types as being ‘recasts’, ‘explicit feedback’, ‘repetition’, ‘elicitation’, ‘metalinguistic feedback’, and ‘clarification requests’. In parts of this study, the latter four types were classed together as ‘prompts’ because they aim at pushing the students to say the correct forms of language. Student exchanges were defined in four ways: content, communication, management, and explicit language-focused exchanges. The results show the number of moves per category of corrective feedback type used by each of the teachers, the overall number of feedback moves per context, and even the overall number of feedback moves provided by each teacher in each context. The findings indicated that recasts yielded the highest number of feedback moves. Recasts were also the favored feedback type provided by the teachers. However, when recasts were compared to prompts, prompts were used often by teachers, and thus suggesting that at least two of the teachers usually pushed their students to say the correct form. The findings also indicated that explicit language-focused exchanges yielded the highest number of feedback moves, whereas management exchanges had the fewest. In conclusion, this study suggests that context plays a role in the provision of corrective feedback, and teachers appear to favor recasts over any other single feedback type. The findings also confirmed that similar results which have been found in other cultural and educational contexts can be yielded in the Swedish EFL classroom.</p>

<p>Årligen kommer ett stort antal barn och ungdomar utan medföljande förälder eller annan legal vårdnadshavare till Sverige för att söka asyl, så kallade ensamkommande flyktingbarn och ungdomar. De ensamkommande barnen har rätt till skydd, skolgång, sjukvård och en meningsfull vardag där de kan knyta sociala kontakter. De här barnen behöver få trygghet och normalitet i sin tillvaro för att kunna utvecklas, känna sig säkra och få en chans till ett bra liv. Ansvaret för ungdomarnas boende och omvårdnad ligger på kommunnivå och kräver att det finns kompetent och kunnig personal som möter dessa ungdomar. Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur personalen arbetar på ett boende för ensamkommande flyktingungdomar för att utveckla mening, identitet och trygghet över kulturella gränser. Metoden som användes var fyra intervjuer med narrativ teori som inspiration för att få fram personalens berättelser istället för enbart svar på ställda frågor och få en djupare förståelse för personalens påverkan på verksamheten och de ensamkommande flyktingungdomarna. Resultatet visade att personalen arbetar utifrån samtal för att skapa en ömsesidig trygghet och tillit inom boendet och genom det sker en samhällsintroduktion och integration för de ensamkommande flyktingungdomarna med en samtidig respekt och förståelse för deras egen kultur. Utifrån detta arbete skapas en värdegrund hos ungdomarna i svensk demokrati och en utveckling av deras identitet. Analysen av berättelserna visar att de fem ord som är målsättningsord för organisationen, samhörighet, egenvärde, samhällsintroduktion, ansvar och möjligheter kan sammanfattas till den demokratiska värdegrunden som arbetet sker utifrån.</p> / <p>Every year a great number of children and youth come to Sweden without any parent or legal guardian, seeking asylum, they are called unaccompanied refugee youth. These unaccompanied minors are entitled to protection, school, healthcare and a meaningful everyday life, where they can make social contacts. These minors need stability and normality in their life to be able to develop, feel secure and have a chance to a good life. The municipality has the responsibility for the minors living conditions and care and this demands competent and knowledgeable personnel to work with these minors. The purpose of the study was to examine how personnel in housing for unaccompanied refugee youth work with meaning, identity and security across cultural borders. The method was four interviews with narrative theory as inspiration to get stories more than just answers to questions and a deeper knowledge for the personnel’s influence on the organization and the unaccompanied refugee youth. The result showed that the personnel worked from conversation to create a mutual security and trust within the housing and through that a community introduction and integration takes place with a simultaneous respect and understanding for the youths own culture. From this basic values are created for Swedish democracy and development of the youth’s identity is created. The analysis of the stories shows that the five words that is the aim for the organization, solidarity, self-worth, community introduction, responsibility and possibilities can be concluded as the democratic basic values that the personnel work is conducted from.</p>

<p><p><strong>Purpose:</strong> Corporate communication strategies have a central role in disseminating and creating meaning to the organizations’ visions, strategies and goals. But many employees do not know the organization’s overall strategies and goals, nor how well the organization achieves these. The aim of this study was to investigate and describe perceptions about internal communication, primarily focusing on communication about strategies and goals. The aim was also to show similarities and differences in ideas about internal communication, and to indentify where any potential problems and deficiencies may occur.</p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong>Three semi-structured interviews were made, two with persons in a management position and one group interview with employees. Nine people in three different hierarchical levels within the same department were interviewed. All interviewees were males aged 35 – 60 years.</p><p><strong>Findings: </strong>The results showed that corporate communication in the organization was characterized by a transmission view of communication, that the employees was nonparticipative in the process of strategy- and goal-setting, and that generally formulated goals and strategies were not sufficiently translated and broken down to local level.</p></p> / <p><p><strong>Syfte: </strong>Strategisk kommunikation har en central roll i att sprida och skapa innebörd åt organisationers visioner, strategier och mål. Men många medarbetare känner inte till organisationens övergripande mål och heller inte hur väl organisationen lyckas uppnå dessa. Denna studies syfte var att undersöka och beskriva hur den interna kommunikationen uppfattas inom en organisation, främst med fokus på kommunikation gällande strategier och mål. Syftet var även att visa på likheter och skillnader i synen på internkommunikation, samt synliggöra vart eventuella problem och brister kan uppstå.</p><p><strong>Metod: </strong>Tre halvstrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes, två med personer i chefsposition och en gruppintervju med medarbetare. Sammanlagt intervjuades 9 personer på tre olika hierarkiska nivåer inom samma avdelning. Samtliga intervjupersoner var män i åldern 35 – 60 år.</p><p><strong>Resultat: </strong>Studien visade att den strategiska kommunikationen inom organisationen präglades av en transmissionssyn på kommunikation, att medarbetarna inte varit delaktiga i mål- och strategiprocesser samt att övergipande och allmänt formulerade mål och strategier inte översatts och brutits ner till lokal nivå i tillräckligt stor utsträckning.</p></p>

<p>The aim of the dissertation is to understand the playing of computer games based on its own conditions, and questions are asked such as what is the meaning constructed around playing and themselves as players, what is the social construction of playing and how can playing computer games be understood from the perspective of youth culture? A basic interest in the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of Bildung in an informal context outside the institutions, activities and genres that traditionally stand for Bildung.</p><p>The empirical investigation that forms the basis of this thesis i in the form of presence at various LANs and interviews with players. The research perspective includes a hermeneutic point of departure and playing computer games is interpreted and understood from three perspectives: playing computer games as a meaning of Bildung (play and mimesis), as social meaning (friendship and community) and as cultural (style).</p><p>The results demonstrates that playing computer games is something the player does to relax, to have fun and it makes the time that passes meaningful. For dedicated players, playing computer games is a longing for community. To be a member of a community provides the opportunity to become someone in relation to the others. To participate in the community of players is a way to achieve understanding about how one is expected to behave in a larger community, that is to say society. The players are not much interested in clothes and fashion. Alcohol and other drugs are disapproved. Not stealing from others in the LAN, helping each other and sharing both knowledge and material things are also ways of expressing style. </p><p>Playing computergames is Bildung and the experiences and insights wich playing can provide should have a place in a vision regarding Bildung in our time. The teachers and the school should make use of the free-time experiences that young people take with them to school.</p>

<p>The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to the debate about Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and provide a practical tool for teachers with which they can relate to ethical and moral learning in the ESD context. This aim is based on the ambition to develop an approach that takes its starting point from our practical experience of ethics and morals, inspired by the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the transactional perspective developed by John Dewey. This implies that ethics and morals are regarded as a human tendency that is observable in action. The central method used to clarify ethical and moral meaning-making is, by the use of examples, to remind of common experiences of how this meaning-making appears in everyday situations. These clarifications are made in order to dissolve (rather than solve) philosophical problems, as well as to create new knowledge. The approach has been applied to four different studies. The first study focuses on the differences between three selective traditions in environmental education: <i>fact-based, normative and pluralistic,</i> with regard to the relationship between facts and values. It is argued that a pluralistic approach can be seen as way of relating facts and values in practice, and consequently that the democratic process neither precedes nor succeeds education but is an integral part of it, and that students therefore are constituted as citizens participating in the progress of sustainable development. The purpose of the second study is to suggest an approach that allows <i>in situ</i> analysis of how individuals’ prior experiences are included in the processes of moral meaning-making. A concrete example shows how individuals can transform the moral discourse in different situations. In the third study, it is suggested that the ethical tendency can be recognised as a communication in which certain values and actions are treated as if they were universally good and right. Three different kinds of situations in which this communication appears are highlighted: <i>personal moral reactions, norms for correct behaviour and ethical reflections.</i>The diverse conditions for learning in these situations are discussed, and specific notice is taken of the risk of indoctrination in ESD. The fourth study addresses the question of how to understand and deal with criticism in a pluralistic educational approach. Through reminders of how criticism appears in everyday practice, it is argued that criticism does not necessarily have to be understood theoretically. Criticism can also be seen as the diverse ways in which human beings morally react, encounter different norms and ethically reflect.</p>

<p>The overall aim of this thesis is to develop a typology of the relationship between parents and schools by clarifying different meanings of that relationship. The study is anchored in a tradition within the sociology of knowledge which stresses the ongoing interpretative struggle between different social groups (Mannheim 1928/1968). Based on this theoretical approach, and in the light of international research, four models of the parent–school relationship are developed. Each model is related to an overall system of meaning, thereby clarifying competing conceptualizations of central concepts such as “parent” and “involvement”.</p><p>The partnership model (1) stresses that it is in the children’s best educational interests to encourage cooperation between parents and schools. I argue that this model was originally based on the concept of equality, but that this concept was replaced in the 1980s by those of efficiency and learning.</p><p>The user participation model (2) entails formal involvement of parents in the governance of individual schools. Participatory democracy, I argue, is one component in an overall system of meaning for this model. The other is efficiency, a concept that is related to changes in school governing bodies and school management during the 1980s.</p><p>The choice model (3) emphasizes the rights of parents to choose among schools for the sake of their own children. Despite different interpretations of what choice entails, I argue that this model of the parent–school relationship can be related to an overall system of meaning in which the autonomous civil citizen is in focus.</p><p>The separation model (4) takes as its starting point the differences between parents (home) and teachers (school) and problematizes the endeavour to achieve cooperation between the two. I argue that one component in the overall system of meaning associated with this model could be termed constitutive differences, a component that is also embedded in the concept of teacher professionalism. Two other components of the separation model are equality and integrity, the latter from the vantage point of children and young people.</p><p>The thesis also analyses the parent–school relationship in the Swedish historical context, using the four models and the concepts mentioned above as analytical tools. In the first period, beginning with the reports of the 1940 School Committee and the 1946 School Commission, the focus was on the partnership model and the separation model. The user participation model was introduced in connection with a proposal to establish local governing bodies in the mid-1970s, and the choice model emerged, in the Swedish context, in the early 1990s.</p>

No description available.

<p>When we converse we constantly fail to observe the rules of conversation in order to simplify and make dialogues more effective. The scriptwriters who work with TV shows use non-observances of maxims in order to evoke different feelings from their viewers. The aim of this paper was to investigate how frequently non-observances of maxims occurred in the TV shows Desperate Housewives and That 70’s Show. I examined where and why they were used as well as how often flouting was used compared to violations. The base of the study was a drama and a comedy show.</p><p>Research has shown that the maxim of relevance is most frequently used to create different comical or dramatic situations. The scriptwriters have their characters ignore what is relevant to the situations in order to make them come off as flustered, odd and stupid in humorous situations and as mysterious, cowardly, respectful or bold in dramatic situations. Also research shows that flouting occurs more frequently than violations when it comes to breaking maxims. Violations occur most often with the maxim of quality when the characters lie to mislead in order to direct blame away from him/herself. In Conclusion, this investigation has shown that non-observances of maxims are important for scriptwriters in order to create humorous and dramatic situations in verbal interaction.</p>

<p>This thesis deals with idioms taken from contemporary newspapers. The purpose is to find out which idioms are known and used by native speakers of different ages and also to what extent the entries in the dictionaries offer accurate descriptions to the meaning of these idioms. We already know that idioms which have been modified, as often is the case in newspapers, are often more difficult to understand than others.</p><p>The study has been conducted by means of questionnaires answered by native speakers in Germany. In order to assess the ability that German native speakers have to understand and use these idioms, I have chosen informants from three age groups; the first two groups of informants are grammar school students at a German Gymnasium, in the 7 and the 10 form respectively and the last group consists of adult speakers in Germany with university education. This last group conforms to the final phase of language acquisition.</p><p>The results clearly show that younger generations - and to a certain extent older students and indeed educated adults - are less likely to understand idioms which have complex explanations in the dictionaries and/or whose meanings have been modified. Similarly, all age groups are more likely to understand idioms with simple explanations, those which appear frequently on the Internet and those whose meanings have not been modified, though there is a higher degree of “tolerance” when it comes to complex idioms among the adults.</p><p>It is also clear that the meaning of an idiom cannot always be fully explained out of context. In most cases dictionaries offer an explanation that functions in most contexts, yet it is not uncommon for the meaning of an idiom to be complex and to vary more or less depending on the context. As a way to find out how frequent the idioms are, I have compared their frequency in www.Google.de and found that there is a clear correlation between high frequency in Google and the knowledge displayed by the informants.</p>

Numbers convey different meanings when used in different contexts (Wiese, 2003). In a cardinal context, a number will tell us how many entities are in a set and convey quantity meaning. In an ordinal context, a number will refer to the relative position (or rank) of one element within a sequence; non-numerical ordered series (e.g. the letters of the alphabet) can also be used to provide meaningful order information. Because quantity and order are linked up with each other in the cognitive number domain (the larger the quantity a number refers to, the later it is located in the conventional number sequence), the question of whether they rely on some common or distinct underlying mechanism(s) is theoretically relevant and was addressed in the present thesis. Experimental studies showed evidence of both similarities (similar distance and SNARC effects, recruitment of parietal and frontal regions, and conjoint impairment or preservation after brain damage) and dissociations (different developmental course, dissociation after cerebral lesion, and specific behavioural markers) between quantity and order neuro-functional processes. The aim of the present thesis was to clarify the relationship between numerical quantity and order processing and to test the hypothesis that they rely on (at least partially) dissociated mechanisms. We tested this hypothesis in a single case study, an electrophysiological study and in two behavioural experiments. In the neuropsychological study, we reported the case of patient CO, who showed Gerstmann syndrome after bilateral parietal damage and became unable to process sequence order relations (e.g. he couldn't recite the number sequence backwards, nor decide whether a number, letter, day or month comes before or after a given target in the corresponding sequence, and he was unable to verify the order of items in a pair). Nonetheless, the patient had largely preserved quantity processing abilities (he could compare numbers and dot patterns to find the smaller or larger, and showed a standard distance effect, he could produce a number smaller or larger than a given target, and match dot patterns with Arabic numerals). Overall, CO's pattern of performance was interpreted as reflecting the involvement of different mechanisms when processing quantity or sequence order relations. Our electrophysiological study corroborated this finding since different spatio-temporal patterns of the distance effect were observed when subjects had to process numbers in a quantity comparison task or in an order judgment task. Quantity processing elicited an early distance effect over the P2p component on left parietal sites, whereas the distance effect was slightly delayed and bilaterally distributed in the numerical order judgment task; and this latter task additionally recruited prefrontal regions on a later (P3-counterpart) component. Finally, our behavioural study further emphasized the involvement of different mechanisms underlying the processing of quantity and numerical order and provided some evidence about the nature of these specific mechanisms. In the number comparison (quantity) task, the standard distance effect was proposed to reflect the involvement of a magnitude comparison mechanism; whereas the reverse distance effect observed in the numerical order verification task was taken as evidence for the recruitment of a serial search (recitation) process. Besides, the pair-order effect was also found to specifically affect order but not quantity judgments. Taken together, the data collected in the present thesis lend further support to the hypothesis that quantity and numerical order rely on distinct processing mechanisms that can be damaged selectively after cerebral lesions, that recruit similar brain areas but with a different spatio-temporal course and that show specific behavioural markers.