This essay focuses on studying senior high school students’ usage of and attitudes towards American and British English. It also investigates what influences for the students’ use of English and attitudes towards the two varieties can be found in school and outside of school, and how that affects the students’ own variety of English. The study has been carried out using a questionnaire as method and the results have been analyzed through theoretical perspectives. The results show that American English is the favored variety of the two, both in usage, attitudes and influences outside of school. However, a majority of the students states that they use a mixed variety consisting of both American English and British English. The results show that this is also the most commonly variety actually used by the students. A mixed variety is what a large part of the students express is being taught in school as well. This shows that the teaching of English in Swedish schools today follow the directions in the policy documents set up by the National Agency of Education stating that communicative skills are desirable. A mixed variety is accepted and there are no restrictions concerning variety used.

This diploma thesis with the future through the eyes of senior high school students, especially with its contents and time location of these contents. The theoretical part presents the most famous time perspective theories and the relationship between adolescents and their future. The emhasis is on introducing czech and also foreign research on a similar topic. The empirical part has four goals: find out which future contents senior high school students are dealing with, 2. where these contents are located in time, 3. how important are the contents and 4. what is the relationship between the future contents and student's past and present. They were done semi-structured interviews within the first and the second goal, then these interviews were coded and interpreted by using elements of grounded theory. To answer the other two goals students filled out questionnaire Ten most important life events by Cottle. The discussion part presents results of the research and comparison with the results of other research. The most senior high school students deal (in the context of the future) with university study, profession, travelling, independence and making their own family. Key words: time perspective, future time perspective, future orientation, late adolescence, senior high school students