Globalisation and fast evolution of technologies have driven people to immigrate and live outside their home country. The multicultural society is no longer extraordinary. This thesis project explores the role and form of technologies and interactive design in assisting the parents with an ethnic background to introduce their culture and language to their children, as well as in maintaining its application in their everyday lives. The primary focus group are parents whose originated from Indonesia and have been living in other countries for more than two years. This research has utilised the user-research method employed in the design research process. The result suggested that persistence, consistency and community support are primary in promoting the preservation of the parents’ cultural background and language. Therefore, technology and interactive design have a significant impact to support it. The design outcome is a physical prototype combined with digitalised media support such as a website and an application.

Ocean models are increasingly able to synthesize a large temporal domain with fine spatial resolution. With this increase in functionality and availability, ocean models are in high demand by researchers, establishing a critical need for validating a model’s ability to represent interior ocean dynamics. Satellite measurements are typically used for validation, however these measurements are limited to the upper layers of the ocean and therefore satellite measurements of sea surface height and sea surface temperature are the most validated output parameters of three-dimensional ocean models. Unfortunately there is a paucity of model validation studies for the interior ocean. This study fills a knowledge gap by contrasting model data from the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) for the interior ocean in the Tongue of the Ocean (TOTO), Bahamas and the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) against observational (i.e., in situ) data collected in both locations. Conductivity temperature and depth (CTD) data in the GoM were collected during five research cruises by the DEEPEND Consortium between May of 2015 and May 2017. These data were collected as part of the investigation into the impact of oil spills on faunal communities in deep water of the GoM. CTD and expendable CTD (XCTD) data in the TOTO were collected by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) detachment Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) in support of U.S. Navy acoustic testing between 1997 and 2017 to characterize the sound velocity profile of the water column. The global 1/12° HYCOM configuration (GLBu0.08) was found to be a better fit in the upper 400 and 250 meters of the TOTO for temperature and salinity, respectively, than the GoM 1/25° HYCOM configuration (GOMI0.04 1/25°) fit the GoM in situ data for the same depths. The GoM 1/25° HYCOM configuration (GOMI0.04 1/25°) provided a better fit in the GoM for depths of 500 and 300 meters and deeper for temperature and salinity, respectively, than the global 1/12° HYCOM configuration (GLBu0.08) fit the TOTO in situ data at the same depths. A comprehensive comparison of the vertical profile between the model and observational data for each of the regions of interest provides insight into using HYCOM forecast data for future applications.

Mother tongue teaching (modersmålsundervisning) has started from the 1960s in Sweden and is open to the students with Chinese as mother tongue. Swedish Chinese mother tongue teaching is different from the overseas Chinese education considering of it is offered by the Swedish municipalities, for example, Stockholm municipality, Huddinge municipality and etc. One of the most fundamental aspects in Chinese teaching is Chinese characters teaching. How to teach Chinese characters is discussed heatedly not only in China but also overseas. With the previous research overview, it is found that there are numerous approved ways to teach Chinese characters but with very limited available information on the teaching methods used in mother tongue classes in Sweden and therefore I did the research about several selected methods to see which one is considered as most effective and preferred by both the students and teachers together with collecting brief background information of them.  The research is done among the Chinese mother tongue teachers and the students who take part in the Chinese mother tongue lessons. The teaching methods are specific to teach Chinese characters’ pronunciation, formation, meaning and usage. The main research methods are snowball sampling and questionnaire.  The results indicate that the majority of Chinese mother tongue teacher participants are with no teaching licenses in Sweden and lack of teacher professional education and not all the students use Chinese as the main home language. The language level can be varied. Additionally, although the most of the choices made by the teachers and students on the preferred teaching methods are overlapped but there are also different choices which draw the attention from the mother tongue teachers.

Bakgrund: Helamning rekommenderas de första sex månaderna och har många hälsomässiga fördelar för både moder och barn. Svårigheter vid amning kan kopplas till tidiga amningsstopp och kort tungband kan vara en orsak till dessa amningssvårigheter. Syfte: Syftet är att belysa mödrars erfarenheter av amningssvårigheter relaterat till kort tungband och av tungbandsklipp. Metod: Kvalitativ studie med induktiv ansats baserades på semistrukturerade intervjuer med tio informanter via video- eller telefonsamtal, strategiskt utvalda utifrån inklusions- och exklusionskriterier. Materialet analyserades med en tematisk innehållsanalys. Resultat: Mödrarnas erfarenheter av amningssvårigheter relaterat till kort tungband och tungbandsklipp kan visa sig som både fysiska eller psykiska symtom så som smärtande bröstvårtor och ångest. Flera av mödrarna upplevde att deras amningssvårigheter inte blev hörda eller uppmärksammade av vårdpersonalen samt att de upplevde ett bristande stöd. Flera upplevde också att det fanns en kunskapsbrist beträffande kort tungband inom vården och ett fåtal av mödrarna visste inte vad kort tungband var eller vad det innebar. Flera av mödrarna upplevde även att informationen kring själva tungbandsklippet var bristfällig samt vad de kunde vänta sig för resultat efteråt. Slutsats: Mödrar och barn med amningssvårigheter relaterat till kort tungband och tungbandsklipp får olika bemötande, bedömningar och åtgärder beroende på vilken kunskap som den vårdkontakt de möter besitter. Det finns ett behov av att arbeta fram en nationell handlingsplan för kort tungband hos barn för att alla ska få tillgång till samma vård. / Background: Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended the first six months of life and has many health benefits for both mother and child. Difficulties during breastfeeding can be associated with early breastfeeding cessation and tongue-tie can be one of the causes leading to breastfeeding difficulties.  Aim: The aim was to elucidate mothers’ experiences of breastfeeding difficulties in relation to tongue-tie and frenotomy.  Method: A qualitative inductive study based on semi-structured interviews with 10 informants via video- or telephone calls was conducted. Purposive sampling with inclusion- and exclusion criteria was chosen. Data was analyzed using a thematic content analysis.  Result: Mothers’ experiences of breastfeeding difficulties in relation to tongue-tie and frenotomy appear as both physical and psychological symptoms such as nipple pain and anxiety. Many of the mothers expressed that their difficulties were not heard or acknowledged by the health care staff and they also experienced a lack of support. Many of the mothers also experienced a lack of knowledge in the health care system regarding tongue-tie and a few of the mothers did not know what tongue-tie was or what it meant. Several of the mothers also experienced a lack of information regarding the frenotomy and what result they may expect afterwards.  Conclusion: Mothers and children with breastfeeding difficulties in relation to tongue-tie and frenotomy are treated and assessed differently depending on the knowledge of the health care staff. There is a need to develop a national careplan for children with tongue-tie so that all children have the same access to equal care

Given the perception that it lacks differentiated study for distinct linguistic varieties under the general discussion of mother tongue tuition, this study is devoted to the Chinese mother tongue education in Sweden. It aims to better understand the motivational issues in the Chinese mother tongue learning for Swedish-Chinese simultaneous bilinguals from the teachers’ perspective. Interview was chosen as the primary fieldwork method to solicit teachers’ understanding and experience on the subject. It is found out that the teachers experience motivation of target students as a multifaceted issue and their strategies stretch over a wide spectrum. The collected empirics are analyzed with the help of linguistic theories of the Chinese language and bilingualism, as well as motivational theories in language learning. It is concluded that the family plays a vital role in the development of bilingualism and that the multiplicity and the morphographic nature of the Chinese language impose extra challenge on Chinese mother tongue teachers and Swedish-Chinese simultaneous bilinguals, at the same time the current general curriculum for mother tongue teaching fails to provide sufficient and relevant guidance to Chinese mother tongue teaching.

There is a stone in Muxía, a Galician seaside village, called the Waving Stone. It used to move and produce a loud and easy-to-identify sound in that process. However, it broke during a storm in 2017, forcing the place to adapt to its new characteristics: the value of that object in the landscape is not anymore its motion but the memory of that movement that people in the area keep and transmit.  Both this essay and the exhibition it accompanies use this story as an analogy to talk about the linguistic transmission break of the Galician tongue and of the minoritized culture of which it is a part. Thus, the work research how the young generation who is used to hear Galician but to talk in Spanish relate to its own culture from a forced distance, making us need to do a big effort to relearn our own language. Distorted representations we received or artistic expressions that we couldn´t experience make it more difficult for us to see how a minoritized culture is never an image but an event, being constantly broken and rebuilt. Like a huge stone on the coast that, even silent, is still able to make a group of people identify around it.

The purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between acoustic and kinematic measures of diphthong production in 11 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 11 neurologically healthy control speakers. The participants produced four diphthongs: /ɔɪ/, /aʊ/, /aɪ/, /eɪ/. These sounds were spoken in a sentence context. Their speech audio signal was recorded with a microphone and their tongue movements were recorded with a magnetic tracking system. The first and second formants (F1 and F2) were computed with acoustic analysis software, and these signals were time-aligned with the vertical and anteroposterior magnet movement records. Pearson correlations between F1 and the magnet's vertical movement and between F2 and anteroposterior movement were computed for the individual diphthongs. The results of this study revealed an often non-linear relationship between the acoustic and kinematic measures. The degree to which the formant measures predicted the lingual movements varied across speakers and also during the on-glide, transition, and off-glide phases of the diphthongs. The findings of this study suggest that the relationship between formants and tongue movements is more complex than would be predicted from the theoretical origins of F1 and F2. Thus, researchers should be aware that acoustic parameters might not always accurately reflect the physical movements of articulators.

Andelen flerspråkiga elever i svensk skola fortsätter att öka. Med detta behöver synen på flerspråkighet och hur lärare på bästa sätt arbetar med dessa barn förändras. Syftet med denna studie har varit att bidra med kunskaper om hur pedagoger i grundskolans tidigare år tillämpar transspråkande praktiskt i den dagliga undervisningen. Vi har genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med sex verksamma lärare i grundskolans tidigare år försökt ringa in hur lärarna arbetar samt vilka möjligheter och utmaningar de ser med den transspråkande praktiken. Resultatet som vi fått fram genom en tematisk analys, visar på många fördelar med den transspråkande praktiken. Lärarna vittnar om fördelar för kunskapsutveckling, språkutveckling och identitetsutveckling och förmedlar exempel på hur de arbetar med den transspråkande praktiken. Resultatet visar även på utmaningar som känslan av att förlora kontrollen om elever tillåts att använda sitt modersmål i undervisningen då läraren kanske inte kan det språk som talas.  De berättar också om bristen på utbildning i arbete med flerspråkiga elever. Vi lyfter även studiehandledaren som en nyckelperson för en transspråkande praktik och problematiserar tillgången till samt den bristande gemensamma planeringen för studiehandledare och undervisande pedagog.

Digital tools in the mother tongue education.The purpose of my work is to find out how digital tools can be used in the mother tongue education. As a teacher in different schools, I have seen how my teaching colleagues are using the computer as a tool in teaching. This has caused me to be inspired by my colleagues 'and students' interest in computers. My thought and my purpose with this work is to develop mother tongue education, thereby bringing it in to year 2016. I will find out what the difficulties and obstacles that modernization may face, and how it can be tackled and how we can overcome the difficulties.To answer this I will carry out a qualitative study in the form of semi-structured interviews. I'm not going to interview other teachers, but am using my educational capital to answer my questions but will, however, conduct interviews with my students who have mother tongue education. I analyzed the collected material from the interviews based on the motivation theory, but I also used and applied what previous research had said about digital tools in the education/mother tongue education. Based on the results from my interviews, as well as my analysis, I have come up with my development for my field that is a process that takes just five steps. Introduce compulsory mother tongue education for all students. Develop the mother tongue education and produce new, modern school textbooks and literature. Further educate mother tongue teachers. Using software like Fronter, SchoolSoft, Unikum, Google Drive and other school programs. Introduce a balanced, varied teaching with the help of Power Point, Smart Boards, the Internet and various Apps / learning games.

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