Umeå Studies in Language and Literature – serie

This study explores the marketability of Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, published in the US in 1934. The term marketability is used to refer to the book as a potentially desirable object for sale on the market, promoted by the Book-of-the-Month-Club. It is also used to refer to Seven Gothic Tales as a literary investigation of the conditions of being and identity-construction at a time when mature capitalism evolved into a consumer-based economy during the first half of the twentieth century. In this reading, the Great Depression figures as a moment that reveals the degree to which consumerist ideology and logic had become the only way to imagine being and identity, a condition that Seven Gothic Tales both reflects and resists. The effects of globalized transformation of production and consumption were felt in the two places that went into the making of Seven Gothic Tales: colonial Kenya where the author lived between 1914 and 1931 and where the book was begun, and the US where it was first published. This study argues that the success of Seven Gothic Tales in the US depended on the marketing strategies of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, but also on the way in which Isak Dinesen's experience of colonial Kenya was an experience of commercial modernity that reverberated with the experience of the American readers.

How can we preserve human dignity in the face of war, conflict and suffering? How far does responsibility to the Other reach? What are the ethical implications of writing and reading stories that explore these questions? Employing a narrative-ethical approach, Articulable Humanity explores these issues in Nuruddin Farah's (1945-) three trilogies: Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, Blood in the Sun, and Past lmperfect. In a literary field where ethical themes have been conceived as essentially political, Articulable Humanity contributes an original in-depth study of the ethical underpinnings of Farah's postcolonial enquiries, with bearings also on the larger fields of post-colonial studies, narrative theory, and moral philosophy.

This study examines conceptions of criticality and its instruction in the History learning environment in Sweden, Russia, and Australia as evidenced in one sample upper secondary class in each country. Transnational findings from an analysis of educational policy documents, teacher and student interview data, together with data from classrooms, reveal varied interpretations of the term criticality. While criticality is conceptualised as a generic skill of questioning at the overarching curriculum level, it is reconceptualised as a discipline-specific skill at the subject level. Discipline-specific conceptions include criticality as source criticism, as meaning making from historical evidence, as questioning historical narratives, and as educating for citizenship. The findings indicate that the visionary criticality objectives of the curricula might be more limited at the local policy level both as a result of interviewees' conceptions of criticality and classroom practicalities. This transnational study proposes some policy harmonisation measures towards equity of education with regard to criticality instruction for all upper secondary students, as required in the national curricula.

This thesis reports on a study, which investigated the process of early foreign language learning in a classroom context and the functions of multi-word units of language known as formulaic sequences in the oral language production of young foreign language learners. A classroom with 11 students in the age range 9 to 11 years was observed and video recorded for 16 sessions (90 minutes per session). The observations were accompanied by two elicitation tasks. 10 sessions out of the 16 sessions of the collected speech samples were transcribed chronologically. In the next step, formulaic sequences were identified based on pre-established criteria, which were further developed during the analysis. The data was analyzed in order to identify the functions of formulaic sequences in learners' oral language production in addition to the inter-learner variations in the application of formulaic sequences for different functions. The results revealed evidence of incidental learning of formulaic sequences from input; the language input provided instances for the learners to learn multi-word units. In addition, formulaic sequences played different roles in the language production of the learners. These sequences helped young language learners to overcome their lack of knowledge, to improve their fluency, and to enjoy some language play. Formulaic sequences were used as a strategy to economize effort on processing and also to buy time for processing. The findings of the study suggested that language users might introduce dis-fluency in the production of their sequences in order to buy time for further processing. Moreover, the data provided examples illustrating communicative functions of formulaic sequences where the use of formulaic sequences was affected by the relationship between the speaker and listener. The analysis revealed that although all the learners applied formulaic sequences in their language production, there was a great variation among individual learners in their intention and the extent of the application of formulaic sequences. Some learners used these sequences to be able to extend their utterances and produce more of the language, whereas other learners used them to avoid further language production. In sum, it seemed that individual learners' different personalities, needs or limitations served as explanation for the application of formulaic sequences in different contexts.

Learning to write in a third language is demanding and according to the European Commission (2012) often unsuccessful in the European context. This thesis shows that a teaching approach incorporating writing strategies and metacognitive reflections helps upper secondary students to master this challenge. The foreign language teacher is encouraged to include the teaching of writing strategies and to invite students to talk about language, their writing and themselves as learners. These recommentations are based on a writing intervention study in a Swedish upper secondary school. The intervention supported the development of skills required for argumentative writing in German as a third language. The students' writing was investigated from three prespectives: writing products, writing processes and metacognitive knowledge. The investigation of metacognitive knowledge revealed a number of learner- and language-related variables, which are important for the interplay of learners' attitudes, performance and strategic behaviour in the language learning classroom.