Stereotypes and myths are created by media to simplify and mystify reality. The two are used to form negative stereotypical images that are used as tools of social oppression in today’s white patriarchy. This essay will focus on how Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts black womanhood and motherhood and resists the reductive images of black women through the narrative technique. In the text we find the stereotypical images of the Mammy and the Matriarch in the character Pauline "Polly" Breedlove, both simplifying and mystifying black motherhood but also condescending towards African-American family constellations. The text resists these images by making readers inhabit Polly who at first fits in to the two archetypes, only to then give us additional information and use an engaging narrative technique that invites the reader to decide if Polly really is the Mammy and the Matriarch.

En kritisk textanalys av mediedrevet av den före detta handelsministern Maria Borelius.

The purpose of this study is to examine the use and application of the curriculum cycle in Swedish as a second language teaching and how the relationship between theory and practice might look like. The questions that formed the basis of this study addresses how the curriculum cycle is used in teaching of Swedish as a second language and how the curriculum cycle is applied in teaching materials for students learning Swedish as a second language. The research methods chosen for this study are a qualitative semi-structured interview study and a qualitative teaching material analysis where I interviewed three teachers and analyzed two textbooks. The theory on which this study is based is Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning that clarifies the idea of that communication and interaction between people are crucial parts for how sociocultural resources are formed and passed on. After analyzing the interviews, it can be concluded that it is used frequently where each phase is essential in order to achieve the goal. The teachers also explained that the students develop cooperation and communication skills and a learning experience where they learn from each other when accomplishing the phases. The other method used in this study was a systematic conceptual analysis focusing on verbs in imperatives where I studied which forms of work and phases of the curriculum cycle that were presented in textbooks for Swedish as a second language. As a result, it can be concluded that the curriculum cycle is applied as a method and a tool with different strategies that help students to achieve a certain goal. The analyses also showed that both teaching materials contain elements where students work individually, in pairs and in groups. 

This study is concerned with the description of the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the attributive adjective self-proclaimed, employing corpus-linguistic methodology to explore its meaning from user-based data. The initial query provided the material from which a lexical pro-file of the target word was constructed, systematically describing collocational data, semantic preferences, semantic associations and discourse prosodies. Qualitative analysis of sample con-cordances illustrated the role of the target word in expressing different kinds of meaning-bearing stances. The results demonstrate the importance of context and communicative functionality as constraints determining meaning, determining the discourse prosodies of self-proclaimed as one of either negation; accepted-positive and accepted-negative. Further, the analysis of self-proclaimed as a stance marker indicates the linking evaluative meanings of extended lexical units to the project of linguistic description of intersubjective stancetaking as a possibly fruitful venue for research

As globalization becomes a more and more recognized phenomenon with an increased flow of goods, people and information across nations’ boarders, the way we communicate is influenced. The act of communication has turned from more traditional means of communicating correctly between mostly native speakers to newer ways where the main goal is to achieve understanding between participants, whether they have the same origin or not. One language that is specifically affected by this is the English language, which is taught in Swedish schools as a major school subject. In regard to this, the aim of this degree project was to investigate how the Swedish policy documents governing the English subject education contributes to the language socialization of students in becoming a certain type of language user. The questions which were posed in order to reach an understanding of this were the following:

• Which conceptions of the students’ communicative competence could be seen in Lgr 11 and other policy documents governing the English subject education in compulsory school between the students’ fifth and seventh year of school?
• Which language practices were presented for the students’ language usage in Lgr 11 and other policy documents governing the English subject education in compulsory school between the students’ fifth and seventh year of school?
• Which contexts were presented for the students’ language usage in Lgr 11 and other policy documents governing the English subject education in compulsory school between the students’ fifth and seventh year of school?  

These questions were answered in accordance with a second language socialization perspective and theories about communicative competence, functions of English and context, through a discourse analysis focused on the positioning of the subject.

The results of this study were that the student was positioned both as a novice and an advanced language user of the English language without any direct connection between the two. This could be seen based on how the students were expected to make initial contacts with the English language whilst the policy documents at the same time present an abstractedly formulated communicative competence with an emphasis on the students’ ability to use aspects of it in relation to the whole of it. Furthermore could be deduced that the teacher’s competence and ability to scaffold the students’ learning were determinant for the language user shaped by the English teaching as the policy documents only covers certain functions of the English language and aspects of contexts.    

The main aim of this essay is to examine how the Swedish comprehensive teachers reflect on and work with the Biblical stories and texts in their teaching. The research questions are; how are the Swedish teachers working with the Biblical stories and texts; what sort of stories do they choose and why; what kinds of emphasis do they put on the stories and texts and how do they perceive them. We have performed a qualitative study and the results show that Biblical stories and texts receive limited attention in the classrooms. The study shows that this is due to a number of factors such as lack of time, ignorance, and lack of knowledge regarding the issues. It also shows that the Swedish teachers rely on the teachers of religious studies to bring up the subject and that they are afraid they might offend some of their students. Paradoxically, the essay also shows that all teachers believe the study of Biblical stories and texts play an important role in improving the students understanding of literature in general.

This essay is a study of how English is used in a Swedish discussion forum called Flashback. The mixing of two languages when speaking or writing is called Code switching. Code switching often occurs in bilingual societies. In Sweden it is possible to say that English is a second language due to the daily encounter with the language through education, but also through different media. The daily encounter with English and the number of English loan words in Swedish might be a reason why code switching exists in Sweden. The material that was analyzed in this essay was collected from Flashback and analyzed with a method based on Sharp’s (2001) study of spoken language. The aim of this study was to see how often and in what way the users on Flashback code switched between Swedish and English. The results showed that even though English was used in the discussion, Swedish was the main language. Most of the code switches that were found in the material occurred in mixed units, in other words English was mixed with Swedish.

The aim of this study is to examine what perception grade 2 students has of dialogue when focusing on the Swedish language. The study is supported by phenomenography, which focuses on the students’ own conclusions surrounding the importance of dialogue. The survey is also supported by a metacognitive perspective. To achieve the aim, the following three questions has been formulated:

• What perceptions do students in grade 2 have concerning dialogue?
• In what way does the students’ perceptions of dialogue differ?
• Do the students perceive dialogue as something of value?

In summary, the results of this study are that in each student group it is agreed upon that dialogues are important but a majority of the students finds it difficult to keep up a dialogue. Therefore, it is important that teachers get all the help they need to be able to work with oracy, i.e. the ability to use oral tools such as speaking and listening. For them to succeed Mercer (2017) urges that oracy, as a tool, receives much more attention in schools.

Dyslexia is a functional problem, affecting the ability to read and write. As future teachers, we will meet students with dyslexia. The purpose with this exam study has therefore been to describe dyslexia and its causes. Another purpose was to find out – from the perspective of a teacher – what experienced teachers know about the problem and how they in practical work can enhance the learning process for students with dyslexia, both individually and in class. A connected purpose was to study results from research in how to facilitate learning for dyslectic students. (N = 27). The hypothesis was that teacher’s knowledge about dyslexia was too shallow. Our method of data collection was quantitative and qualitative enquiries in two schools in Stockholm County. The result derived from the answers was rather similar in character and confirmed our hypothesis.

This chapter explores the status of English-language popular culture throughout the Nordic countries with regard to its relation to attitudes toward English and its effect on everyday discourse. The traditions and contemporary developments of English as an academic subject in the Nordic countries reveal an important shift in the symbolic capital of English. While English as a linguistic system and Anglophone literature and culture once symbolized erudition and high intellectual pursuits, the abstract idea and concrete manifestations of English in the Nordic countries are now more likely to invoke Anglophone popular culture and media artifacts. However, the close association between popular culture and the English language has fostered a Nordic-wide relationship to English that deviates from native Anglophone norms, whereby the filtering of English through popular culture encourages the use of English as a language of play and imbues a distance to its affective properties. The chapter presents a pan-Nordic overview of the rise of Anglophone popular culture and the effects of the stronghold that the English language enjoys in the Nordic countries as a result of the wholesale adoption of English-language popular culture. 

This chapter presents an analysis of intranet postings generated within a Swedish web consultancy during its pursuit of a tobacco company as client. Drawing from theories of crisis management, Beers Fägersten focuses on the emergent conflict and debate between employees who are in favor of having a tobacco company as a client, and those who are against it. The intranet thread reflects the use of discursive strategies typical of conflict management, but also strategies specific to the digital environment. A recurring theme in the debate is the navigation, negotiation and distinction of personal vs. corporate identities and interests.

In this chapter, examples from classroom interaction are presented to illustrate how languagefunctions in and is influenced by the sociocultural setting of the EFL classroom. The chapterfeatures two distinct focal points: First, the predominant use of English by the teacher and theminimal use of English by the students are proposed as instrumental activities where English canbe considered a mediating semiotic tool. I suggest that English-language interaction in the EFLclassroom represents Vygotsky‘s concept of a social semiotic tool that is specifically related to aninstitutional context (Wertsch 1998). Conversely, the second focus of the chapter is on theinverse use of Swedish, which mainly features as the students‘ language of social speech and theteacher‘s language of regulatory, disciplinary discourse. The teacher‘s code choice and theestablished practice of code-switching thus serve to redirect the students‘ focus, either toengaging in the learning of English, or to behaving according to the institutional context.

In this paper, the Internet message board forum is proposed as an example of a community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992) in which contributors exhibit common linguistic conventions and forms of participation. The emergence of individual identities in interaction is examined in the genre-specific context of hip-hop Internet message boards. A corpus analysis of message board postings clearly shows that contributors systematically exploit the spoken and written qualities of the language of message boards, the " third medium" (Crystal, 2001) to identify themselves linguistically. Linguistic conventions or practices reveal a tendency among contributors to discursively construction their identities via a "social positioning of self and other" (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) as experts or non-experts in the hip-hop community. Contributors' identities as experts or simply in-group members are further corraborated or established by the codification not only of non-standard pronunciations and grammar characteristic of speech, but also of non-standard orthography, which demands a written forum to be appreciated, as it is neutralized and unremarkable in speech. Because of the written and spoken qualities of message board discourse, both the content and the form of postings can be manipulated to showcase familiarity with hip-hop discursive practices. Internet message boards therefore represent the ideal forum for discursively constructing a hip-hop identity.

In this paper I present, analyze and consider the implications of the use of English swear words in Swedish media. First, I investigate the relationship between language and the media, focusing on the role of standard language forms in media discourse. I continue by exploring, within an Anglophone context, the use of swear words in the media. Next I present a brief survey of the use of English in Swedish. Finally, I present examples of the use of English-language swear words in Swedish media, showing how English-language swear words are appropriated by speakers of Swedish and suggesting that the use of English swear words in the media ratifies this appropriation, in turn establishing this practice as standard. I discuss the implications of this development in terms of the use of English swear words within a non-native speaker speech community, how usage may be in conflict with English native-speaker norms, and how the use of English swear words might come to characterize modern Swedish as well as a Swedish variety of English.

Who’s Swearing Now? represents an investigation of how people actually swear, illustrated by a collection of over 500 spontaneous swearing utterances along with their social and linguistic contexts. The book features a focus on the use of eight swear words: ass, bitch, cunt, damn, dick, fuck, hell, shit and their possible inflections or derivations, e.g., asshole or motherfucker, offering a solution to the controversial issue of defining swear words and swearing by limiting the investigation to the core set of words most common to previous swearing studies. The specific focus results in accurate depictions of contextualized swearing utterances. Precise frequency counts are thus enabled which, along with offensiveness ratings of contextualized and non-contextualized swearing, enable a clarification of The Swearing Paradox, referring to the phenomenon of frequently used swear words also being those which traditionally are judged to be the most offensive.

The book revisits the relationship between gender and swear word usage, but considers the distribution based on the core subset of swear words, revealing similarities where others have claimed differences. Significantly, Who’s Swearing Now? considers the aspect of race with regards to swear word usage, and reveals behavioral differences between, for example, White and African American males and females with regards to word preferences as well as social impetuses for and effects of swearing. Questionnaire and interview data supplement the swearing utterances, revealing participants’ individual credos about their own use or non-use of swear words and, interestingly, about others’ allowed or ideally prohibited use of swear words. These sets of data present thought-provoking and often entertaining statements regarding the unwritten set of rules governing swearing behavior. Who’s Swearing Now? concludes with close analyses of four recent and highly publicized incidences of public swear word usage, considered in light of the spontaneous swearing utterances, speaker and addressee variables such as gender, race and age, and perceptions of offensiveness and propriety.

This chapter presents a theory of texts often used in Scandinavian “sakprosa” research. In the chapter, the constitutive features of any text are presented. It is shown how the text as a cultural artefact has the quality of and at the same time being a unique utterance and instantiating a text norm. In the text theory presented, text is part of a text culture, to which other text sharing similar norms belong. Thus, a “text” is conceived as an utterance that competent participants in a specific cultural time and space assign a certain cultural value.

The aim of this essay is to examine how students in 6-9 grade with reading and writing difficulties are treated and supported by teachers and staff at Ideskolan, a community school north of Stockholm. I have chosen to answer the following question:

- How does Ideskolan cope with and support students with reading and writing difficulties

This has in turn generated the following questions:

- How is special education organized at Ideskolan?

- Is a diagnose always needed in order to deploy extra support?

The method I have employed is observation while participating, together with informal talks and interviews. I have visited Ideskolan twice, one week at the time. The material that the visits have generated is the foundation of the essay, supported by previous research in the field.

The essay clarifies what right to special support students have according to law, regulations, curriculum and teaching plans and what they look like in reality at Ideskolan. This paper questions why schools focus on the individual student in these matters instead on the schools organisation and way of working. It might not automatically be the students’ difficulties with reading and writing that limits their continued learning, but rather the schools attitude towards students with special needs. Some ways of working might minimize the difficulties while some can increase them. If so, perhaps a change is in order?

The essay also discusses the role of the special teacher – should she be supporting the students or her colleagues, or both. It also discusses if the teacher training should evolve to better suite the need to handle students with reading and writing difficulties.

Even though Ideskolan recognizes the fact that two – three students in each class suffers with reading and writing difficulties the support to these students are inadequate. The school can excuse it self by saying that there is no “right way to go”, for each student with reading and writing difficulties are unique and there for require different support.

This study use the theory of community of practice and the theory of mediating tools to explore how teachers develop student’s writing in the Swedish subject in Swedish upper secondary school. The aim of the study is to display the potential to learn and develop writing through participating in the community of practice that is the classroom, as well as with the help of mediational means in the classroom and in other contexts. Five teachers are interviewed on their ideas about teaching students to develop writing. Results from the study show potential for learning through communities of practice and mediational means in the teachers’ use of collaborative writing and interaction between students as well as their aspiration to connect school writing with writing in other contexts. The way in wich some teacher’s switch from collaborative and interactive work forms to individual, when the student’s texts are to be assessed and graded, could on the other hand be considered problematic. The results also imply that the teachers’ choices and positions must be understood in relation to ideas on writing expressed by the students and in the curriculum and in national writing tests.  

Commercials effect norms and much more, but how does the individual abide to these normativeperceptions in Swedish media? The norm is only first identified when it differs from what is not the norm. Therefor knowledge surrounding the commercials influential power on individuals is needed. The purpose of this study is to examine how diversity in society can be mirrored in campaign posters in subway stations. The starting point is to apply a linguistic perspective to be able to analyze how written text and image can express meaning through a sociosemiotic multimodal analysis from the interpersonalmeta-function. The material consists of four campaign posters and each poster is analyzed as a whole. If needed the individuals or parts being displayed in the poster will be analyzed as well. The chosen campaign posters are: 1177 hjälper dygnet runt, Många har många frågor, GÖR PLATS! and Julstök.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of self-assessment in writing in the Swedish subject. This has been done through the research questions, “how does the pupils’ handling of language rules and formalities change during self-assessment?”, as well as “how does it affect the teacher’s conditions to assess pupil texts if the pupils’ carry out/completed self-assessment?”. The study’s theoretical starting point has been the socio-cultural perspective and the concepts of “mediation”, “artefacts” and “appropriation” have been the basis for analysis of the results. The study has been conducted through a Lesson study where two different teaching arrangements were carried out, at two different schools in two different grades. Both classes had to complete a lesson in writing where self-assessment was not used, and then to conduct a lesson where self-assessment was carried out by having pupils use checklists to self-assess their own texts. The results from the two different teaching arrangements were then compared with each other.

The result shows that self-assessment through the checklist raised the quality of the pupils’ texts when it comes to handling language rules and formality. Overall, 27 out of the 32 pupils made fewer errors in the lesson where the checklist was used. A total of 149 errors were made in the lesson without a checklist and 64 errors in the lesson where the checklist was used. The results show that the checklist could function as a supplement to the teacher’s assessment regarding language rules and formality, but cannot be considered to replace this assessment entirely. On the other hand, the lower number of errors the pupils make with the help of the checklist can cause the teacher’s conditions to change, as the teacher needs to spend less time on just this.

I denna kritiska studie undersöks nyhetsrapportering om de svenska sis-hemmen genom att analysera hur sis-hem och tvångsvård för barn och unga beskrivs i nyhetstexter. Syftet är att blottlägga vilka som kommer till tals i nyhetsrapporteringen samt vilka diskurser, normer och ideal som realiseras språkligt. På sis-hem tvångsvårdas barn och unga mellan 12-21 år med problematiska hemförhållanden och psykosociala problem, men även de som dömts för lagbrott. Tvångsvården av barn och unga kan beskrivas som en komplex verksamhet då den existerar i gränslandet mellan socialtjänst och rättssystem. Undersökningen visar att den svenska regeringen och andra politiska företrädare är de grupper somfrämst får komma till tals. Nyhetsredaktionerna verkar tillsammans med de politiska företrädarna vara de som sätter agendan för vad som ska diskuteras omkring sis-hem och barn i tvångsvård under den undersökta tidsperioden. När barn som tvångsvårdas på institutioner deltar i nyhetsrapporteringen blir det främst som omständigheter. De påverkas av åsikter, händelser och handlingar men ges ingen plats som aktiva deltagare i nyhetsrapporteringen. Undersökningen visar vidare att det verkar ha skett en förändring de senaste decennierna i synsättet på frågor som berör barn, unga och brott. Från att handla om vård och behandling verkar diskussionen alltmer fokusera på straff, säkerhet och andra kriminalpolitiska frågor.

This study explores the social organization and the necessary involvement in accomplishing sharedness in joint decision-making, by adopting a members’ perspective on food preparation. Prior research on joint decision-making has mostly focused on verbal analysis of institutional interactions, e.g. medical encounters. In contrast, the current study carries out a multimodal interaction analysis of joint decision-making in everyday informal cooking among friends. The analysis demonstrates a crucial function of embodied actions, such as bodily stance, eye gaze and manipulation of objects, in organizing and coordinating decision-making sequences. Since the decisions in this particular setting often are based on a multisensory access to the objects of decision, establishing and displaying epistemic access comprise a constitutive part of joint decision-making. In line with this, we show that not allowing for an epistemically equal point of departure, the participants may be sanctioned when not accessing the empirical object of decision, e.g., not tasting the sauce. In addition to shedding light on the temporal organization of actions and the epistemic ac- cess central to organizing joint decision-making, the study offers an understanding of how partici- pants as social actors constitute themselves as friends and family by means of making decisions shared in the midst of a mundane activity that constitutes daily life.

This is a qualitative analysis that, based on systemic functional linguistics, or SFL, and genre theory, has aimed to study the genre pedagogical implications on written language as they occur in narrative stories and expositions whilst the model is introduced. Systemic functional linguistics is a linguistic theory that views the organisation of language as functional options for meaning; language is a set of resources to channel meaning through realisation. Genre theory elucidates the pragmatic and educational uses of SFL in the categorizing of language in configurations of meanings as they are set and understood in different cultures.  The purpose of the survey is to do so with focus on successful and less successful writers by attempting to answer two primal issues:

1. How is development of written language in reference to the introduction of the genre pedagogical model visible in the studied texts?
2. How does genre pedagogical teaching influence successful and less successful writers as visible in their writing with a certain purpose?

To answer these issues the survey is based on narratives and expositions written by high school students who have been divided into two groups according to the purpose of the survey. One text in each genre has been written by the students before and after lessons based on the genre pedagogical learning wheel explaining the relevant genres. Thereafter the texts have been analysed, both in accordance to the staging of the relevant genres, but also with an inductive focus on the variations of the texts.  The results show that significant development of the texts, after the genre pedagogical lessons, is visible in both student groups in different ways. This demonstrates how the genre pedagogical approach to teaching language is a method that is able to lift students regardless of their prior merits.