<p>The purpose of this essay is to find out how upper secondary English teachers should work in order to reach the weaker students. I am interested in what has been written about mixed-ability classes, the challenges they present and most of all how teachers of English need to work in such classes to reach all students, especially the weaker ones.</p><p>I have also interviewed three upper secondary teachers about how they work to reach the weaker students in their classes.</p><p>My findings are that, according to the teachers interviewed, the best way to deal with the problem is to bring back ability grouping. The literature I read mostly had negative views on this method and stressed the importance of differentiation and motivation instead. Both the literature and the teachers claimed that a good atmosphere, clear instructions, structure and setting routines were the most important factors when working with mixed ability classes.</p>

<p>English prepositions cause problems for learners of English. The way prepositions are taught has impact on how students learn. Using corpora in teaching makes it possible for teachers and pupils to explore language together and is a good alternative to filling in missing prepositions on worksheets. Sometimes linguistic errors are caused by mother tongue interference. Little research has been made earlier with a Swedish contrastive approach to prepositions but a great deal of literature concern language transfer and mother tongue interference. This essay is written on the assumption that Swedish as a first language interferes with English and causes prepositional mistakes.</p><p>Two classes of ninth graders participated in my investigation. I wanted to find out if students performed better when they had given answers to choose from or when they had to produce the preposition themselves. My study proved that pupils had a better knowledge of prepositions perceptively than productively. It also proved that learners resorted to Swedish when they did not know the correct answer. Many learners fail to recognise prepositions as parts of multiword expressions. By teaching students how to notice grammatical collocations and lexical chunks we can help them to achieve acceptable levels of language proficiency and accuracy.</p>

<p>The aim of this essay is to investigate teachers’, students’ and researchers’ opinions on the idea of using literature to motivate students into learning grammar. How is and how could authentic texts be used in grammar teaching?</p><p>My research is based on a questionnaire given to 23 students at an upper secondary school after participating in a lesson constructed to try out the essay thesis. The essay is also based on literature on the subject and three personal interviews.</p><p>The students were very positive towards the idea and stated that it would feel more real to be taught grammar from real texts. The teachers did not want to teach grammar sections as before. Instead they choose to use a more individual response strategy which they feel gives better results. The idea of giving individual response as a way of grammar teaching is also advocated in the background. The idea of using real texts instead of a textbook is given both positive and negative credit.</p>

<p>Abstract:</p><p>The aim with this study is to discuss teachers’ individual views and thoughts regarding working with pupils with reading problems in foreign language learning. The study is based on qualitative research and includes interviews with four working teachers at the upper secondary level at one school. The main focus is to illustrate strategies expressed by the teachers involved in this study concerning pupils and reading problems in foreign language learning. Some of the earlier studies done regarding this subject emphasize motivation as a good strategy to use in school in order to pay more attention to pupils and encourage them to do better. Furthermore, teachers should work with literature in a new way, thus making use of the new technology available such as computers and projectors. New technology would make education more appealing and allow pupils to be involved with literature in a new way, familiar to the pupils’ daily life activities.</p><p>This study is done accordingly to the approach of two theories, namely phenomenography and reader-response theory. This study does not aim to show any right or wrong strategies from the teachers, it only assumes to show their own thoughts and views regarding this issue. Hopefully this study would help and bring new ideas to forthcoming teachers about reading disabilities and teaching strategies.</p>

<p>The following paper has been dedicated to the verb like, which is one of the verbs in the English language that can take either a to-infinitive or an -ing participle as a complement. The purpose of the paper is to examine if there are any differences in distribution and meaning between the two complements. The focus also lies on the different verbs occurring as complements, and the contrast between the verbs occurring as to-infinitives and as -ing participles. There are many theories which have been proposed on the subject that lie as a basis for the investigation.</p><p>The analysis was carried out by means of an investigation of sentences taken from the COBUILDDIRECT corpus, and includes both spoken and written British and American English. The outcome of the analysis has demonstrated that there is usually agreement between the theories and the results; however, there is not always a difference of meaning between the two complements. Moreover, the analysis suggests that there is a difference of verbs occurring as to-infinitives and -ing participles; the would like to construction represents a fixed expression and often occurs together with performative verbs. Finally, the conclusion has been drawn that there is a small but visible difference between the occurrences of the spoken and the written subcorpora when discussing both meaning and verbs occurring as complements. Since the to-infinitive complement is more common than the -ing participle in newspapers, books, and spoken English, the difference includes both detached and involved style as well as a regional difference between British and American English.</p>

<p>The purpose of this study is to present and analyze the translation of seven selected concessive conjuncts – anyway, however, although, though, still, nonetheless and yet – in Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons translated by Ola Klingberg, by means of a comparative method combined with a qualitative analysis. Background and theory are mainly based on Altenberg (1999, 2002) for the conjuncts and Ingo (1991) for translation strategies. The aim is fulfilled by answering the three research questions: 1. How does Klingberg translate the seven selected concessive conjuncts into Swedish? 2. What factors influence the choice of translation alternative? 3. What kinds of strategies does Klingberg use? The main result is that the conjuncts translate into many different alternatives, although most frequently into the Swedish adversative men, followed by a Swedish concessive like ändå. However, the analysis of anyway is inconclusive because there were not enough tokens. The main conclusion is that translation is a difficult area to be involved in since numerous aspects affect the choice of translation alternative, even though it is shown that it is definitely possible to translate more or less ‘correctly’. A second conclusion is that some words are more likely to be translated with a particular word than others.</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p>Translation is not an easy task. There is a plethora of problems and difficulties which needs to be tackled in the process of translating a text from one language to another. This analysis concentrates on three of them – terminology, connectors and cultural aspects. The study is based on the Swedish translation of an English text concerning the medical and ritual use of chocolate in ancient Native American cultures as well as in Europe during the colonial era. The main problem encountered in the translation of this text was how to generalize it so it would suit the Swedish public but still maintain the level of formality of the source text. The specialized terminology found belongs to the fields of medicine and botany and these terms were often explained or replaced with more common words. A couple of the cultural aspects were also explained, since, for example, the cultural area Mesoamerica may not be known to the target readers unless they are knowledgeable in anthropology or archaeology. This made the target text somewhat less formal than the original so, to compensate, the translation of the adverbial connectors however and thus were on occasion translated with the more formal Swedish emellertid and således.</p>

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>This essay concerns Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market and its use in a Swedish upper secondary classroom. The purpose of this essay was to analyse the poem through a Marxist perspective and investigate how both the analysis of the poem and the poem itself could be used when teaching English to an upper secondary class.</p><p>This was done in two stages; firstly by analysing the Victorian society’s effect on Rossetti’s poem through a Marxist criticism perspective and secondly by using a specific pedagogic method called the Socratic Dialogue method when analysing the use of the analysis and the poem in the classroom.</p><p>When analysing the poem and how it has been affected by its contemporary society, it becomes clear that the poem provides a critique in several ways towards consumerism and social ideals of Victorian Britain. Concerning the use of the poem and the analysis in the upper secondary English classroom it is evident that the poem and the literary analysis combined provides an interesting view on Victorian Britain for the pupils to discuss while having Socratic seminars.</p>

<p>This study examines to what extent preposition stranding is used in connection with which, whom and who in three different UK papers. Also what factors influence the use of preposition stranding has been studied. The hypothesis that pied-piping is more common than preposition stranding has been confirmed.</p><p>A factor that has a certain influence on the use of preposition stranding is the style of the paper. The more formal of the papers studied, The Times, did not use preposition stranding to the same extent as the other two, The Sun and Today.</p><p>The subject domain of the texts has influence on the use of preposition stranding, with more informal domains such as sports and miscellaneous (e.g. gossip) using stranding to a higher extent than the other domains, e.g. business, politics and culture. The prepositions themselves also influence the use of preposition stranding with some prepositions, such as on, with, for and into, that are likely to appear stranded and others, such as in that are likely to appear pied-piped.</p>

<p>Namibia is a country where the official language has been English since independence in 1990. There are different national languages in the country and a majority of the people do not have English as a mother tongue. Nevertheless, the language of instruction from fourth grade and onwards is indeed English. Consequently, for the majority of the population the education is in their second language. What this essay explores is the role English as a second language has as a medium of instruction and the implications it may have. It is a minor field study that was carried out with the help of a scholarship from SIDA (Swedish Agency for International Development Cooperation) and it took place in a school in Northern Namibia, April and May 2007. It is a qualitative study that explores the use of English among teachers and students as well as the transition from mother tongue instruction to English instruction and the implications that this can have for the quality of education. The reality of the Namibian students that have to study and perform in a second language is questioned and discussed from pedagogical and linguistic points of view. The results show that most pupils do not speak English before starting fourth grade. Furthermore, the sudden transition from mother tongue to English instruction creates some descent in the participation of the pupils and possibly in the learning, not only of the new language but also of the content subjects. As far as the teachers concern, there are positive but ambiguous opinions among them concerning English as a medium of instruction.</p>