Academic literature on the topic 'English as she is taught'

The habitual aspect has been a feature of Irish English for centuries. How it has evolved may have had a lot to do with contact between Standard English and the Celtic language, Irish, spoken in Ireland. As time passes does the impact which these two languages have had on each other weaken? How has a major feature of Irish English, the habitual aspect, fared in the digital world? This essay executes some digital detective work and finds that habitual markers do be always there…

The findings of this study predict that students who utilize five specific sentence constructions on timed single-draft writing compositions will have higher holistic scores than students who do not utilize the specific constructions. Students in the treatment group who were taught to use the five constructions through thorough and consistent instruction in a semester length first year writing course showed statistically significant gains, 4.698 points on a 0-18 scale, based on comparison of pre-test and post-test writing samples. The findings suggest that specific style instruction at the sentence level should be part of the first year writing course curriculum, and possibly in the writing curriculum of secondary education as well.

The purpose of this study is to find out whether pupils English language learning benefits from using Swedish during the English lessons. I decided to collect my material from interviews in combination with classroom observations. I chose to start with the observation of the class and the teacher during one lesson before I did my interview. It is difficult to draw any conclusions of this with only the two schools I visited. If I were to do it again I would have chosen two schools that both start teaching English at the same age and devote the same amount of time each week to learning English. I did not discover any findings to support my theory that it would be beneficial to exclude Swedish during English lessons, nor did I find the opposite. The teachers from the observations felt it was necessary to use Swedish during the English lessons with the argument that it helped them learn Swedish better. Since that was not exactly my question I felt that my findings were inconclusive.

AbstractThis degree project focuses motivation for learning English among a group of Swedish uppersecondary school students. By employing a socio-educational perspective, some vital factorsbehind a strong motivation for learning English in school are investigated through individualinterviews. Components in the past, heralding either a high level of motivation for English or a low such, are primarily focused. Moreover, essential socio-educational factors behind managing to achieve grades in English despite a low level of motivation and various impediments, such as severe socio-psychological adversities, are looked into. While motivation for English is emphasized as a critical factor, in accordance with socio-educational motivation theory, the study also stresses the importance of a positive first encounter with the English language, a satisfying English teacher-student relationship, and a sense of success in the English classroom. But above all, the study stresses a need for early tests among young students for reading disabilities, which according to this study often go undetected and thus severely impede any kind of second language learning and motivation.

The study is about the experience of Arab University students whose main subjects are taught in English. It investigates and discusses many English language problems in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in teaching, learning and studying medicine, pure science and technical English. In general, Arab learners of the English language encounter problems in the four skills of the English language, in speaking, writing, reading and listening. They also show weaknesses in many aspects of the English language such as vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling, morphology and syntax. The question is how these language difficulties affect their studies in medicine. The initial hypothesis was that all depended on the students’ facility in English, but this turned out not to be the case. The research started with the analysis of students’ written replies to questions. This was followed by the development of a questionnaire distributed to 736 medical students. This explored various factors in relation to their success in exams to find out which factors might be significant. There were few correlations between success in medical exams and previous encounters with the English language. The one correlation between the test results and the questionnaire findings was not the uses of and familiarity with English but the parents’ background. The research therefore went on to explore, through interviews, and analysis of written statements, the students’ attitudes towards the teaching of medicine in relation to the use of the English language. It was found that the hypothesis of the importance of English as a prerequisite for success was not borne out. What was discovered was the students’ pragmatic attitude towards their study and that what they thought they needed as medical practitioners depended on a kind of secondary technical vocabulary. The research discusses some of the effects of learning and teaching theories and their relationship to the process of the education system. Whilst social constructivism is held to be the ideal one to apply to the learning process, this research demonstrated that behaviorism and rote learning still dominated the experience of the students in their learning of medicine. Despite their continued commitment to the ideals of learning English, the students took a pragmatic approach to their studies, which consisted of a mixture of Arabic and English medical vocabulary.

This thesis examines Dorothy Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915-1967) as a doubly autobiographical text. Pilgrimage is widely considered to be a fictionalised retelling of Richardson's own life, and many critics have found little difference between the lives of Dorothy Richardson and her protagonist Miriam Henderson. Following the Künstlerroman tradition, Richardson's novel sequence concerns itself exclusively with the life and coming to adulthood of Miriam Henderson who, like her creator, has an interest in documenting her own life. Thus, as Pilgrimage is the product of Richardson's struggle to find a place within literature, it is Miriam's too. I begin by foregrounding the theoretical landscape of autobiographical theory to date, focusing on feminist works and noting a historical concentration on male autobiography in critical pieces. In particular, Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) and Max Saunders' Self Impression (2010) are used to discuss the uneasy space Pilgrimage occupies as an example of autobiographical fiction, fitting into neither binary genre. Pilgrimage is then read chronologically, noting Richardson's development as a writer alongside her protagonist's. Miriam is a voracious reader and the progression of her interest in reading is discussed throughout this thesis, finding the influence of a variety of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ouida, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James and more. The following of this interest in literature is accompanied by a tracking of the narrative innovations Richardson employs in the writing of the Pilgrimage sequence, such as narrative shifts and unusual punctuation formations, which she uses to suggest points in the text in which Miriam can be seen to be telling her life story in the same way that Richardson has. A case is then made for Pilgrimage as doubly autobiographical, meaning that it is Miriam Henderson writing about herself, by Richardson writing about Henderson as herself. This dual mode of life writing can be traced through the novel sequence, developing in its many narrative innovations, as well as in Miriam's clear interest in both the reading and the writing of literature. Pilgrimage then represents both Dorothy Richardson and Miriam Henderson's attempts to represent their lives in literature.

This thesis examines the heteronormativity and gender roles in A. A. Milne’s popular children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The research question is “To what extent is A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) portraying heterosexuality as norm?” Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne, 1926) was used as a data corpus and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) model of thematic analysis. One of the main themes examined was masculinity, which was further divided into themes such as social hierarchy and active boys. Another main theme was femininity, which examines Winnie-the-Pooh’s (Milne, 1926) only female character Kanga as a mother and as a passive and less intelligent character. The findings of this thesis suggest that A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) portrays heterosexuality as norm for most part of the data corpus.