<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>Det engelska språket har sedan efterkrigstiden haft en allt större inverkan på svenskan, bl.a. genom att vara det främsta långivande/lånförmedlande språket. Med dessa nya lån följer ofta svårigheter att anpassa orden till svensk grammatik. Målet med min uppsats har varit att undersöka hur engelska inlånade substantiv böjs i plural på svenska: vilka böjningsformer som används, huruvida engelsk eller svensk böjning används oftare, vad försvenskad stavning har för betydelse för pluralböjningen, och om språkbrukare upplever pluralböjningen som något problematiskt. För att besvara dessa frågor genomfördes en undersökning av språket i bloggar samt en enkätundersökning. En lista med inlånade engelska substantiv från 1990 eller senare sammanställdes utifrån Nyordsboken – Med 2000 nya ord in i 2000-talet och användes som material till bloggundersökningen. Enkäten utformades med fokus på ordpar med både svensk och engelsk stavning, och ställde också frågan om informanterna undviker att använda pluralformer av de undersökta substantiven. Enkätundersökningen genomfördes bland två grupper: studenter och språkvårdare. Resultaten visade att majoriteten av substantiven i mitt material böjdes med den engelska pluralformen –s och bland de ord som böjdes med svensk pluraländelse dominerade –er, följt av –ar och –or. En kombination av engelsk och svensk pluralform förekom i ord som bimbosar och logosar. Det fanns flera indikationer på osäkerhet inför pluralböjning, t.ex. flera olika böjningsvarianter, reaktioner på enkäten, och språkvårdarnas oenighet. Anpassning till svensk stavning hade stor inverkan på böjningen i plural och verkar vara en bra strategi för att integrera engelska lånord i svenskan. Informanterna i enkätundersökningen tenderade att undvika ord med engelsk stavning mer än de med svensk stavning.</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>

Utgångspunkten för detta arbete är att införa en tidig språkinlärning av engelska i förskolan. Det tar långt tid att lära sig grunderna i ett främmande språk och barn är mest mottagliga för att lära sig språk i förskoleåldern. Vi valde att skapa en produkt som uppmanar och inspirerar pedagoger och barn till att använda engelska i förskolan. Produkten är uppbyggd i anknytning till ämnesområden ur läroplanen för förskolan med huvudfokus på det engelska språket. Engelskan är på så sätt ämnesintegrerad och blir ett medel för att uppnå strävansmålen. Ämnesområden som behandlas är: matematik, språk, socialt samspel, rörelse och hälsa, skapande samt naturvetenskap och teknik. Produktens utformning fördelas på sex berättelser om den könsneutrala karaktären Charlie som älskar språk. Till varje berättelse finns en tillhörande aktivitet som berör ett ämnesområde. Avslutningsvis finns ett estetiskt extramaterial som kan kopplas ihop med berättelserna och fördjupa inlärningen av det engelska språket med sång och drama. Övergripande instruktioner till häftet presenteras i början. Förberedelser, material och övriga instruktioner presenteras inför varje aktivitet. Materialet riktar sig till barn i åldrarna 3–5 år. Häftet består av 28 sidor med både text och bild. Produkten skickas ut till 12 pedagoger som utvärderar produktens upplägg, användningsområde samt relevans. Resultatet visar att många pedagoger tycker att engelska har en plats i förskolans verksamhet. Produkten mottogs väl av samtliga pedagoger och ansågs vara ett bra och inspirerande grundmaterial som uppmanar dem till att använda det engelska språket i förskolan. / The starting point of this work is to introduce early language learning of English in preschool. It takes a long time to learn the basics of a foreign language and children are most receptive to learning languages ​​in the preschool age. We have chose to create a product that inspires teachers to use English in preschool and find a curiosity about the language in children aged 3–5 years. The product is built in related subject areas from the preschool curriculum with the main focus on the English language. English is thus the subject integrated and becomes a means to achieve the aspirations of the goals. The topics covered include: maths, language, social interaction, movement and health, creativity and science and technology. The product is presented in six stories about the unisex character Charlie who loves language. For each story, there is a related activity involving a subject area. Finally, there is aesthetic extra-material that can be paired with the stories and deepens the learning of the English language with singing and drama. Overall instructions to the booklet are presented in the beginning. Preparations, materials and other instructions are presented to each activity. The summary booklet consists of 28 pages of text and image. The completed product was distributed to 12 educators in preschool who provided feedback and evaluated the design, use and relevance of the product. The results show that many educators think that English has a place in preschool. The product was well received by all educators and was considered to be good and inspiring base material that urged them to use the English language in preschool.

Syftet med denna studie har varit att ur ett likvärdighetsperspektiv undersöka den summativa bedömningen av det nationella provets skriftliga delprov i engelska 6. Fem lärare med olika lång erfarenhet av undervisning och bedömning i engelska har fått ge ett betyg på samma fem elevtexter. Texterna skrevs av elever i årskurs två på gymnasiet utifrån instruktioner till ett exempel på hur en uppgift i Focus: Writing kan se ut. Det analyserade resultatet har visat att lärarnas summativa bedömningar inte kan ses som vare sig valida eller reliabla; rätt saker, men nödvändigtvis inte tillräckligt har bedömts; det är inte heller säkert att en eventuell återkoppling hade främjat elevernas fortsätta lärande; bedömningarna skiljer sig slutligen också orimligt mycket lärarna emellan. Nationella proven kan i det här fallet därmed inte heller ses som en garanti för likvärdiga bedömningar. Orsaker till detta kan tänkas vara olik yrkeserfarenhet; arbetsplats och elevunderlag; ämneskompetens samt det sätt på vilket kunskapskraven och bedömningsanvisningarna är formulerade.