Abstract not available.

This study explores how U.S. college students experience integrative and instrumental motivation and how their sociolinguistic identity is understood, represented and constructed through their multiple experiences learning French as a Foreign Language (FFL) in an intensive Summer French Language Immersion Programs (SFLIPs). The results of the study demonstrate that participants who exhibited the most characteristics in connection to integrative motivation were the ones who took full advantage of the opportunities of being immersed in an environment in which exposure and production of the target language were maximized. The study demonstrates how participants’ lived experiences affect the way they construct their identity, how integrative motivation plays a key role in this construction and addresses a gap in literature by specifically adressing the themes of motivation and identity in the context of intensive French immersion in the U.S.

I have devoted 8 years to prepare for this ethnographic case study. I have analyzed through Bakhtin’s lenses of dialogicality and intertextuality, focusing on exploring an ESL college student, Chen Hua’s online social identity construction through his use of L1 and L2. I have collected multiple layers of data including formal and informal interviews, observational field notes, interactive emails, narratives and online discussion forum contents ever since the focal participant started his 9th grade in a high school, throughout his college and military career. I used ethnographic coding, grounded coding, Gee’s five theoretical tools and critical discourse analysis to analyze the data. The findings indicate that the ESL college student (an ROTC member) constructed his multiple identities through discursive social practices by making use of available resources, making multithreaded social connections from the online texts/discourses to the real world in which he was living. His unique multiple identities constructed through his use of L1 and L2 in computer-mediated communication practices and through other offline social practices, are reflected and embedded within the current macro sociocultural, political, and historical context of the U.S.A., which helped transform and shape him into what he is and how he participates in “serving and sacrificing” for the community and for this country.

This study investigates the reading and studying of Arabic literature in U.S. collegiate education as a site for engagement with alterity. The purpose is to explore how students in foreign language (FL) literature courses encounter alterity, how they construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern Arabic literary texts, and how the political, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which students read shape their reading. Using ethnographic methods, I examine an Arabic literature U.S. collegiate class that I created and taught. Data sources include audio recordings of class discussions, audio recording of out-of-class discussion groups with students, researcher’s memos after classes and out-of-class discussion sessions, in-depth interviews of students, qualitative analysis of students’ written work. Witnessing the growing movement of literacy-based approaches to foreign language education, I use theories of alterity as a framework to illuminate understanding of literacy in foreign language contexts and possibly engender an other-oriented literacy. Notions of alterity that constitutes my theoretical framework are synthesized through analyses of Levinas’s ethics of alterity and post-colonial conceptualization of alterity, supporting my investigation of the consumption of Arabic literature in the Western Academy (Huggan, 2002). The post-colonial lens enables me to interpret the construction of the self and the other through the act of reading within its specific historical, cultural and political contexts (Drabinski, 2011). Building on the works of scholars using Levinas’s ethics to theorize an ethical reading (Attridge, 2004a; Cohen, 2004; Davis, 2010; Tarc, 2015), my theoretical framework envisions an ethical textual engagement with the literary work. Participants of the study encountered different aspects of alterity when reading and studying Arabic literary works, and each aspect posed a different challenge to them. Through the encounter with the alterity of the literary works, the Arabic language and their peers, participants were challenged to rethink their habitual modes of thinking, (Attridge, 2004a), to be open to different interpretation and be uncertain about their own, to embrace their differences (Biesta, 2004), to rely on and be responsible for each other, and learn from each other (Todd, 2003) and to produce knowledge in conversation with an other (Katz, 2013). In their reading, participants encountered cultural distance with the literary works (Attridge, 2011) both close and far and made efforts to account for it. The study demonstrates how alterity as a framework in FL literature class can create opportunities for students to ethically respond to literary works and to each other and engage in learning as a transformative experience of encountering otherness.

Studien syftar till att kartlägga ämneslärares arbetssätt, kunskaper och attityder till elever som lider av Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety, även kallat FLSA. I bakgrunden redogörs för begreppets innebörd, dess uppkomst hos elever och vilken påverkan det har på engelskundervisningen i skolan. Vidare redogörs sambanden mellan undervisningen och språkets roll i det svenska samhället för att ge läsaren en förståelse för de utmaningar som både ämnesläraren och FLSA-elever står inför. Data för studien har samlats in genom kvantitativa elevenkäter samt kvalitativa lärarintervjuer och klassrumsobservationer. Grundad Teori (GT) är den metodansats som använts eftersom denna fokuserar på att nå resultat utifrån empiriska data framför specifika teorier. Resultatet visar att ämneslärare identifierar samma upphovsorsaker till FLSA som forskningen men att dessa inte konsekvent tas i beaktning i undervisningen.

This thesis seeks to examine the translation of selected foreign film-titles in Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1990 to 2002. Lawrence Venuti’s theory on “domesticating translation” and “foreignizing translation” will be taken as the conceptual framework for the study. Building on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s perspective on translation and on his observations about the Anglo-American publishing industry, Venuti asserts that “foreignizing translation”, being a strategy to bring the target-text audience toward the original text, should be preferred over “domesticating translation” as the former would guarantee difference by introducing foreign elements to the text recipients. By doing so, people will have more chances to be exposed to cultures other than their own and thus a heterogeneous society will be formed and maintained. Since Venuti’s study has not touched upon the Asian region situated in the periphery of global culture as opposed to the Anglo-American one, his suggestion for “foreignizing translation” might not be feasible globally. Selected film-titles will be examined in this thesis. Data show that most of the translated titles in Hong Kong are domesticated. The same can be said of Taiwan in recent years, though to a lesser extent. Unlike other text types, film-titles are normally translated or adapted by the local film distributors rather than professionally or academically trained translators. With box-office sales as the major concern of the movie business, the adoption of the domesticating strategy can easily be rationalized, if not justified. Equally notable is the fact that, as recent trend in Taiwan demonstrates, domesticating strategy also reflects a stronger sense of local identity.

Due to an increasing number of students in the Swedish schools who has another first language than Swedish, multilingualism is now a feature all teachers must consider – and language teachers in particular. While multilingualism previously was believed to cause intellectual disabilities, more current research has showed the benefits of being proficient in several languages. Pedagogical strategies such as translanguaging, in which a students’ entire linguistic repertoire is recognized, has been developed, and studies have shown that this has increased students’ metalinguistic awareness. Despite this, a policy analysis of steering documents shows that other languages possibly could be interpreted as a problem in English education. By conducting interviews with English teachers I have identified positive as well as challenging aspects of using students’ first languages in English education in a multilingual classroom. This has concluded in a number of suggestions to policy makers, educators and researchers, in order to better make use of the positive aspects of multilingualism and solve some of the challenges.

This essay presents research on the usage of pedagogical translanguaging in the teaching of English in lower primary schools in Sweden (grades F-3). The focus of the study is to research if and how pedagogical translanguaging is used in English teaching. The data was collected using a qualitative method. Through classroom observations, findings showed that the use of pedagogical translanguaging was recurrent in all six observations. The most common method of pedagogical translanguaging was the use of the first language to enhance pupils’ understanding and code-switching. This paper might help teachers that are struggling to uphold the old paradigm of target language only in foreign language learning but also opens up for a multilingual approach in other subjects.

This study’s aim is to investigate what strategies within cooperative learning teachers’ use in the English classroom. An additional aim is to investigate how teachers’ believe cooperative learning contributes to interaction between students. The study focuses on the perspective of the teachers. Cooperative learning is a pedagogical method with roots from the sociocultural perspective. Furthermore, it is described by Kagan and Stenlev (2006) as a method where students work in groups and cooperate in order to achieve the mutual goal. According to Kagan and Stenlev (2006), the students’ communicative interaction between each other is one of the critical elements of cooperative learning. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with four legitimized teachers. I chose to conduct a qualitative research in order to guarantee valid answers due to the time given. After the interviews, the recorded answers were analyzed and compared to one and other in order to reach answers to my research question. After having finished the result analyze, the recordings of the interviews were deleted. The result of the study shows that teachers tend to use following strategies within cooperative learning: think-pair-share, team-pair-solo, quiz-quiz-trade, jigsaw, poem for two voices and placement consensus. Furthermore, it shows that teachers’ attitude and willingness to use cooperative learning can depend on when they got their degree. However, additional factors may have an impact, such as the lack of further education in connection to the introduction of the new steering document in 2011.

Faktorer som påverkar valet att läsa spanska som moderna språkEn undersökning av en grupp elever från årskurs 6 / Factors that influence the choice of study Spanish in foreign language