Research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that for many languages, children gain an early command of gender. However, often in these languages gender marking is quite overt and provides a clear one-to-one correspondence between a marker and the gender encoded. In Welsh, gender marking is more complex. Gender is marked by mutations, a set of morphophonological changes that affect the initial consonants of words, and the mapping between mutation and gender is quite opaque. Two mutation types are used in part to mark feminine gender: both feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives following feminine nouns undergo Soft Mutation, and the feminine gender of the possessive adjective ei is marked by Aspirate Mutation on the modified noun. The four studied in this thesis examined children's productive command of gender as expressed in the mutation of nouns modified by the definite article, of adjectives modifying nouns, and of nouns modified by the homonymic feminine and masculine possessive adjective. Mutation in non-gendered contexts was also examined. Subjects were 4- to 9 1I2-year-old children from North Wales. First, a seminaturalistic study was conducted to obtain knowledge about children's ability with gender marking. A Cloze procedure was also used to elicit children's production of masculine and feminine forms, both real words and nonsense forms, in a variety of linguistic contexts. Some of these contexts provided cues to gender status, some did not. The data obtained indicated that the acquisition of the Welsh gender system is a drawn-out process, and children have not mastered the system even by 9 112years of age. In addition, children become proficient in marking feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives modifying feminine nouns before they do so on nouns modified by feminine ei. Results suggest that when a language has a complex gender system that is marked by opaque morpho-phonological processes the course of development is protracted and variable.

The aim of this thesis is to explore immigration from Nigeria to the United States and United Kingdom in contemporary Nigerian and English literature by comparing two novels, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah and Chris Cleave's The Other Hand. The authors' authentic experience is described and their opinion on the pressing issues connected with immigration, such as reasons for immigration and psychological trauma associated with it are explored.

This study intended to investigate the language learning strategies used by learners of English as a foreign language, aiming to find the amount of strategies and the domain differences of the strategies used / to reveal the link between strategy use and success levels / and to find out the difference in strategy use between genders and its influence on their achievement in English. 257 (153 male, 104 female) students from Atilim University English Preparatory School participated in the study. At the time of the study all the participants were in the same proficiency level, and were distributed to different classes of the same level. The data were gathered through strategy inventory for language learning (SILL) of Oxford (1990), which was translated to Turkish by Cesur and Fer (2007). The instrument, based on Oxford&rsquo / s (1990) classification of the language learning strategies, is composed of 50 items in six subscales. The participants responded to the inventory before the end of the level they were in. The data were analyzed through SPSS (15.0) to find the relationship of language learning strategies, gender and achievement in learning the target language. To reveal the interconnections between these factors, independent t-tests and an ANOVA test, along with post hoc procedures were performed on the gathered data. The findings of the study revealed that use of language learning strategies are positively effective in success in English, that females were significantly more successful than males in terms of achievement tests, and that they used more language learning strategies in learning English. Depending on the statistical results, it is discovered that there is a significant connection between gender, language learning strategies and achievement in English.

The present study aims to investigate if grade 9 English students, being 15-16 years old, attending a Swedish secondary school, use English slang during their English as a second language lessons, and if so, why they do it, and if there are any differences between the two genders in their slang usage. In order to incorporate a didactic perspective, it is also examined how English teachers deal with their students’ slang usage. Three English lessons has been observed, alongside with interviews with three English teachers, in order to conduct the investigation. The results indicate that slang words are common during grade 9 English lessons, and the male students’ usage of slang exceeds their female counterparts’ usage to a great extent. Reasons for these results can be found in the field of gender language which argues that slang usage, and language usage in general, is strongly connected to identity, and to how the two genders are expected to behave. Moreover, the English teachers display a varied opinion about their students’ slang usage, yet accounts for utilizing it when teaching register and linguistic adaptation. This approach is approved by a great amount of research, which states that by incorporating youth-language, in this case slang, students are able to gain a linguistic awareness where they can identify with what is taught, as well as adapt their language depending on situation and context.