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<p>In order to be able to influence the motivation of second language learners one first has to understand what motivation is, what its preconditions are and how to detect it. The research for this essay was done with the help of one hundred and ten students from seven classes in two different upper secondary schools and most of these learners were first year students.</p><p>The aim was to find and measure the students' motivation to learn English and how this motivation can be influenced in a positive manner. The method used to collect the necessary data was a questionnaire which asked questions about the relevancy of the English course and how frequently the students used English and how interested they were in the language.</p><p>The results give a clear picture of the students' motivational levels as well as to which parts of the English course they respond and to which they do not.        </p>

The goal of this article is to reveal the computational structure of modern principle-and-parameter (Chomskian) linguistic theories: what computational problems do these informal theories pose, and what is the underlying structure of those computations? To do this, I analyze the computational complexity of human language comprehension: what linguistic representation is assigned to a given sound? This problem is factored into smaller, interrelated (but independently statable) problems. For example, in order to understand a given sound, the listener must assign a phonetic form to the sound; determine the morphemes that compose the words in the sound; and calculate the linguistic antecedent of every pronoun in the utterance. I prove that these and other subproblems are all NP-hard, and that language comprehension is itself PSPACE-hard.

Literacy is an important phenomenon in all societies today. Nations around the world put in a great deal of effort and allocate a lot of funding for educational purposes to improve literacy rates of children and to help them to become literate citizens so that they can function better in society. Studies of teacher education in the United States have shown that many of the in-service teachers lack the basic foundation of linguistic constructs needed to improve literacy skills in elementary classrooms. Further, it has been shown that students who were taught by teachers with a linguistic background performed better on reading, writing, and spelling skills than those children who were taught by teachers without such a linguistic background. These studies have recommended better teacher training programs that incorporate classes to specifically teach linguistic constructs. However, there are various factors that may affect literacy development in school children, such as family background and number of books available at home. The majority of these studies have been conducted in the United States and what is true for the U.S. may not be true for other countries. The purpose of this study is to examine the linguistic knowledge of elementary classroom teachers and how it impacts children’s achievement in literacy skills in the North West region of Cameroon where English is the predominant language of instruction in schools. Data were collected from 100 primary school teachers and 200 third grade children from the rural and urban regions, then analyzed using independent t-tests at a 0.05 level of significance. Overall the teachers exemplified a lack of linguistic knowledge; however, when comparing rural to urban, the urban teacher’s linguistic knowledge was significantly higher. Similarly, the children’s results also revealed a higher performance rate from the urban children. Based on the results it is recommended that teacher preparatory programs should foster content and pedagogic expertise and include essential features in literacy instruction. The quality of teachers teaching in the primary schools is important and the Ministry of National Education in Cameroon should ensure a better teacher education program that can prepare confident and knowledgeable teachers.

This qualitative study investigated Spanish language use and linguistic attitudes in Laredo, Texas and the surrounding area from 1860 to 1930. In the public domain, sources include the Spanish and English language newspapers and Webb County Court documents. These were analyzed for evidence of the impact of English language contact and prevailing attitudes towards the use of Spanish from both the Hispanic and Anglo perspective. In the private domain, three major collections of private correspondence as well as other miscellaneous correspondence and records were transcribed and analyzed for evidence of metalinguistic or other attitudes towards Spanish. A linguistic analysis of the orthographic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic features of Spanish used in the correspondence was also conducted. The major collections of correspondence and other private papers include: 1) the John Z. Leyendecker collection, 2) letters from the Clemente and Federico Idar Family Papers, and 3) the Miguel San Miguel Jr. private collection. The multiple authors in these collections come from low to middle income families and from varied educational and linguistic backgrounds, thus providing a broad socio-economic linguistic sample. Findings include a strong support for Spanish language use and teaching/learning of the Spanish language as well as varied levels of language confidence among bilingual and aspiring second language learners. Negative attitudes regarding class and lack of education rather than ethnicity were clearly held by some writers. Additionally, mixed attitudes about the strong presence of the Mexican culture in Laredo were found. The linguistic analysis found little evidence of English impact during the 1860s, but growing evidence of its influence during the early 20th century. Most prevalent were the use of English loan words, nativized loan words, and nonce borrowings. Some evidence of language shift was noted in the younger writers of the twentieth century. A few of the more salient Spanish linguistic features found include the use of the synthetic future verb form, minimal confusion between ser and estar, metathesis, apocope, vowel raising and lowering, and archaic expressions.

English and Swedish, which are both Germanic languages spoken in similar cultures in the Western World, display many similarities with regard to the conceptual metaphors reflected in them. However, the way that the same conceptual metaphor is linguistically instantiated in both languages may be somewhat different. This chapter is a corpus-based analysis of metaphorical ‘path’, ‘road’, and ‘way’ sentences in English produced by speakers with British English as their first language (L1) and Swedish university students with Englishas their second language (L2). The aim is to see how these L2 speakers of English deal with differences at the level of linguistic metaphor in the two languages, and find out how important this level of organization really is. / Embodiment of Motion Metaphors

The presence of Allophone students in French-language secondary schools in Ottawa is gradually increasing. While the politique d’aménagement linguistique (PAL) insists on the use of French within the school, one may begin to wonder which language Allophone students are speaking. French? English? Their native language(s)? This qualitative case study of four multilingual Allophone students explores their language repertoire use in relation to their desired linguistic representation, their linguistic proficiency in French, English, and their native language(s), and their perceptions of language prestige. The results indicate that students spoke a significant amount of English, some French (particularly with their teacher or Francophone classmates), and minimal amounts of their native language. Recommendations are suggested to increase the effectiveness of PAL within a Francophone minority context and to ensure that the policy’s objects are attained.

This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine’s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn’s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain. The columns mostly focus on the readers’ physical appearance, and the beauty myth is clearly an inevitable influence. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the beauty myth is hard-wired into our society’s subconscious. VeckoRevyn is working to prevent this, and even though they have not fully succeeded, they are a part of bringing the phenomenon to the surface of society.

This study aims to investigate the effect of a writing program in the mind mapping approach on the linguistic creativity and writing attitude of third-graders in primary school, that employs a nonequivalent pretest-posttest experimental design to examine how mind mapping method affects the linguistic creativity and writing attitude of students. Two groups of 30 3rd students are separately instructed in writing planning which lasting 12 weeks, 80 minutes per week. One group is instructed in mind mapping method for writing as experimental group. The other group is taught regular method without mind approach as a control group. The instruments includes: (1) Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, TTCT; (2) Writing attitude scale; (3) Mind mapping worksheets; (4) The evaluation sheet of mind mapping; (5) Feedback questionnaire; (6) Teacher¡¦s manuscript. The data were analyzed by one-way ANCOVA and frequency ratio analysis. The main findings were as follow: 1. Students who write with mind mapping method perform significantly better on fluency, flexibility and originality of linguistic creativity. 2. Students who write with mind mapping method perform better on writing preparation and motivation, learning attitude and evaluation as well as self-reflection and thinking ability in writing. 3. The fundamental elements of mind mapping which are association, keywords, hierarchies and categories as well as use of color, are helpful learners to complete mind mapping drawing and writing. 4. Results of students work collaboratively more superior than results of students work individually in mind mapping assessment and quantity of key words, thus it can suggest that group working is more suitable for teaching in mind mapping drawing and linguistic fluency. 5. ¡§Keywords¡¨ helps learners increase their writing capacity; ¡§hierarchies and categories¡¨ help learners sense how to write paragraphs and arrange them properly. 6. It finds a high percentage of the experimental group students agree that applying mind mapping method in writing promotes their writing motivation, creative ability and is helpful in developing their writing performance. Keywords: mind mapping, writing program, linguistic creativity, writing attitude

Literacy is an important phenomenon in all societies today. Nations around the world put in a great deal of effort and allocate a lot of funding for educational purposes to improve literacy rates of children and to help them to become literate citizens so that they can function better in society. Studies of teacher education in the United States have shown that many of the in-service teachers lack the basic foundation of linguistic constructs needed to improve literacy skills in elementary classrooms. Further, it has been shown that students who were taught by teachers with a linguistic background performed better on reading, writing, and spelling skills than those children who were taught by teachers without such a linguistic background. These studies have recommended better teacher training programs that incorporate classes to specifically teach linguistic constructs. However, there are various factors that may affect literacy development in school children, such as family background and number of books available at home. The majority of these studies have been conducted in the United States and what is true for the U.S. may not be true for other countries. The purpose of this study is to examine the linguistic knowledge of elementary classroom teachers and how it impacts children’s achievement in literacy skills in the North West region of Cameroon where English is the predominant language of instruction in schools. Data were collected from 100 primary school teachers and 200 third grade children from the rural and urban regions, then analyzed using independent t-tests at a 0.05 level of significance. Overall the teachers exemplified a lack of linguistic knowledge; however, when comparing rural to urban, the urban teacher’s linguistic knowledge was significantly higher. Similarly, the children’s results also revealed a higher performance rate from the urban children. Based on the results it is recommended that teacher preparatory programs should foster content and pedagogic expertise and include essential features in literacy instruction. The quality of teachers teaching in the primary schools is important and the Ministry of National Education in Cameroon should ensure a better teacher education program that can prepare confident and knowledgeable teachers.