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This paper introduces the Swedish Learner English Corpus (slec), which consists of argumentative texts in English that are written by Swedish junior and senior high school students. slec includes rich metadata, enabling empirical studies of various extra-linguistic variables. Most noteworthy is the inclusion of detailed information on students’ extramural English activities (ee), such as reading, watching, conversing, gaming and engaging in social media in English. In addition, a sub-set of texts from slec have been assessed for proficiency using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (cefr). This paper provides an overview of the corpus compilation process, the metadata, and the available versions of slec. Researchers, teachers and students can access this resource to investigate various aspects of second language use and development, such as the impact of extramural language activities on linguistic complexity.

Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka begreppet livskvalitet inom palliativ vård utifrån ett arbetsterapeutiskt perspektiv. Som metod användes Walker och Avants begreppsanalys. Tre definierande attribut till begreppet livskvalitet framträdde utifrån analysen: livskvalitet är ett subjektivt mått av vardag, livskvalitet utgår från prioriterade högre värden och livskvalitet är föränderligt. Analysen visade även att möjligheten att engagera sig i meningsfulla aktiviteter i vardagen är ett av de mest grundläggande villkoren för att en god livskvalitet ska kunna uppnås för patienter med palliativa vårdbehov. Livskvalitet påverkas av aktivitet respektive passivitet, men dessa faktorer är också en konsekvens av patientens grad av livskvalitet. En god livskvalitet stimulerar till aktivitet och vice versa, en mindre god livskvalitet leder till ökad passivitet. Resultatet visar att det är av stor vikt att arbetsterapeuter inom palliativ vård arbetar utifrån ett personcentrerat förhållningssätt och sätter patienten i ett aktivitetssammanhang relaterat till den unika individens historia, nutid och framtid. Den föränderliga aspekten av livskvalitet medför även möjligheter att förbättra patienternas livskvalitet.

Underrepresentation av kvinnor i styrelser är ett omtalat samhällsproblem. För att inkludera kvinnor och skapa ett styrelserum av mångfald har kvoteringar implementerats i EU. Trots kvoteringsdirektiv om en styrelse där 40 procent ska bestå av kvinnor, uppfyller bolagsstyrelser i Europa inte målen. Incitamenten för en mer jämställd styrelse är, förutom kvinnlig representation och rättigheter, finansiell lönsamhet. En god bolagsstyrning är viktigt för en effektiv ekonomisk hälsa och utveckling och lönsamhet. Könsdiversitet tenderar att öka ekonomisk tillväxt. Trots att fördelar för lönsamhet tillsammans med jämställdhet konstaterats återfinns ofta en ojämn könsfördelning bland bolagsstyrningen i börsnoterade bolag. Idag finns ett flertal studier om könsdiversitet i styrelser kopplat till lönsamhet med blandade resultat. Studierna analyserar ofta en mängd bolag där sektorn banker exkluderas. Banker har en betydande roll i samhället och är viktig för ett lands ekonomiska tillväxt. Studien syftar därför till att analysera om inkludering av kvinnor i bolagsstyrelser har en påverkan på europeiska bankers finansiella lönsamhet. Genom studien lyfts teorierna agentteorin, kritiska massanteorin och intresseteorin för att belysa olika perspektiv av ämnet. Där analyseras och diskuteras hur stor andel kvinnor styrelsen bör utgöra för att kunna göra skillnad samt mångfaldens påverkan på gruppen och resultatet. I studien genomförs analyser på de finansiella lönsamhetsmåtten ROA och Tobins Q. Studiens resultat påvisar genom analyserna att ett positivt samband finns mellan kvinnor i styrelser och finansiell lönsamhet. Analysen testar ett flertal variabler där bankernas storlek, styrelsens storlek och likviditet tas i beaktning. Analysen påvisar även att fler variabler har inverkan på lönsamheten. Studien kan genom resultatet påvisa att kvinnor i styrelsen har en påverkan, men framför allt att mångfald tenderar att öka lönsamhet. Jämställdhet är ett samhällsproblem och belyses genom, Underrepresentation of women in boardrooms are societal issues. To include women and create a diverse boardroom, quotas have been implemented in the EU. Despite directives requiring boards to consist of 40 percent women, European corporate boards fail to meet these goals. Incentives for a more gender-balanced boardroom include, in addition to female representation and rights, financial profitability. Good corporate governance is crucial for effective economic health, and development, and profitability. Gender diversity tend to increase economic growth. Despite benefits for profitability along with gender equality, an uneven gender distribution is often found among corporate boards in listed companies. Today, there are numerous studies on gender diversity in boards linked to profitability with mixed results. These studies often exclude the banking sector. Banks play a significant role in society and are important for a country's economic growth. Therefore, the study aims to analyze whether the inclusion of women in corporate boards affects the financial profitability of European banks. The study highlights the theories of agency theory, critical mass theory, and stakeholder theory to illuminate different perspectives on the subject. The study analyzes and discusses what proportion of women the board should consist of to make a difference, as well as the impact of diversity on the group and the outcome. In the study, analyses are conducted on the financial profitability measures ROA and Tobin's Q. The results of the study demonstrate a positive significant relationship between women on boards and financial profitability. The analysis tests several variables, including bank size, board size, and liquidity. The analysis also indicates that several variables affect profitability. The study's results can demonstrate that women on the board have an impact, but primarily that diversity tends to increase profitability. Gender equality is a societal issue highlighted in the s

Syftet med denna studie har varit att nå en ökad kunskap om skolkuratorers arbete på anpassad grundskola och vilka möjligheter de upplever att de har när det kommer till att ge eleverna som går där stöd. Vi har utifrån syftet genomfört en kvalitativ intervjustudie. Intresset för ämnet och inspiration till studien uppkom under socionomprogrammets verksamhetsförlagda utbildning där vi fick upp ögonen för elever på den anpassade grundskolan utifrån rollen som skolkurator. För att besvara våra frågeställningar valde vi att intervjua skolkuratorer verksamma på anpassade grundskolor i Sverige. Det empiriska material som ligger till grund för vår studie består av åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer med skolkuratorer som i olika utsträckning arbetar med elever på anpassad grundskola. Intervjuerna har transkriberats och bearbetats med stöd av tematisk analys. Vi har använt oss av systemteori och den salutogena teorin om KASAM för att analysera vårt insamlade material. Av våra fynd framkommer det att skolkuratorernas egen vilja, personlighet och engagemang har betydelse för deras arbetssätt och uppgifter. Skolkuratorerna beskriver att de bland annat stödjer sina elever genom att handleda och utbilda skolpersonal samt samordna olika insatser kring eleverna. Resultatet visar även på att skolkuratorernas arbete på anpassad grundskola kännetecknas av mindre arbete på individnivå och färre enskilda samtal jämfört med arbetet på grundskola. Skolkuratorernas upplevda förutsättningar när det kommer till att stödja sina elever tycks avgöras av hur väl de kan samverka med andra aktörer kring eleverna. Det beskrivs också vara av stor betydelse att skolkuratorer på anpassad grundskola har ett helhetsperspektiv i sitt arbete för att kunna ge eleverna som går där det stöd som de behöver. Studiens slutsatser är att skolkuratorer på anpassad grundskola arbetar på många olika sätt för att ge sina elever stöd och att de har olika förutsättningar för att göra just detta. Slutligen vill vi då det

The Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of Spoken American English (LANA-CASE) is a collaborative project between Lancaster University and Northern Arizona University to create a publicly available, large-scale corpus of American English conversation. In this article, we describe the design of LANA-CASE in terms of the challenges that have arisen and how these have been addressed – including decisions related to operationalizing the domain, sampling the data, recruiting participants, and selecting instruments for data collection. In addressing these challenges, we were able to draw on and further develop strategies established in the creation of other spoken corpora (including the British English counterpart to LANA-CASE, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014) as well as to implement recent theoretical and technical innovations related to each step. We hope that this discussion can inform future projects focused on the design and construction of spoken corpora.

Frequent engagement in extramural English (EE) activities (i.e., English-language activities that students engage in outside of the classroom) has been shown to positively influence L2 students’ vocabulary size, listening and reading comprehension, and oral proficiency (e.g., Sundqvist, 2009, 2019; Sylvén & Sundqvist, 2012). However, while previous studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the relationship between EE and students’ receptive knowledge as typically measured through formal tests, our understanding of the relationship between such activities and students’ production remains somewhat rudimentary (though see Kaatari et al., 2023 and Sundqvist & Wikström, 2015). In particular, as lexical complexity has been shown to be strongly correlated with writing quality (Kyle & Crossley, 2016), it seems that an investigation of the relationship between EE activities and lexical complexity would be a fruitful next step toward increasing our understanding of the role that EE activities play in L2 English writing. Against this background, the present study examines the effect of EE activities on one important aspect of lexical complexity – lexical sophistication – in intermediate-level student writing in L2 English. Furthermore, we test the hypothesis posed in Kaatari et al. (2023) that certain EE activities may lead students to produce more speech-like (or informal) writing. The study uses data from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC; Kaatari et al., forthcoming), which consists of argumentative texts written by Swedish junior and senior high school students (school years 7–12). SLEC includes data on how many hours per week students (i) read in English, (ii) watch TV shows or movies in English, (iii) engage in conversations in English, (iv) use social media with English content, and (v) communicate in English while playing computer/video games. We also make use of two reference corpora: ICLE-SE (written university-level argumentative te, The ComplEExity Project: Swedish secondary school students’ use of Extramural English (EE) and its impact on L2 writing development

Questionable research practices: The (un)ethical handling of data in quantitative humanities research. (Larsson, Plonsky, Sterling, Kytö, Yaw, Wood, 2021-2023; Project ID: FOE20-0017)

Begreppet inkludering är inte något som lyfts ordagrant i läroplanen. Trots detta kan man förstå läroplanens formuleringar som att personalen i skolan ska utgå från ett förhållningssätt som syftar till att inkludera alla elever. Denna fallstudies syfte är att undersöka fritidshemmets arbete med elever i behov av stöd utifrån ett helhetsperspektiv. Genom att genomföra en kvalitativ fallstudie på en skola med hjälp utav metoderna intervjuer och observationer har vi kunnat undersöka fritidshemmets arbete med elever i behov av stöd utifrån detta helhetsperspektiv. Helhetsperspektivet i vår studie innebär att vi undersökt olika professioners tankar, erfarenheter och upplevelser. Den tidigare forskning vi valt att använda oss utav är forskning som lyfter förutsättningar, relationer samt begreppet inkludering ur olika perspektiv. Forskningen bidrar bland annat med att belysa innebörden av det breda begreppet inkludering ur olika synvinklar. Genom det relationella- och det psykosociala perspektivet fick vi en möjlighet att genomföra en djupare analys utifrån våra frågeformuleringar. Tillsammans ger perspektiven ett brett synsätt på hur relationer, kommunikation och miljö påverkar elever i behov av stöd. Analysen av vårt resultat har visat en genomgående röd tråd av hur relationer spelar en viktig roll i arbetet med elever i behov av stöd. Den genomgående röda tråden har bestått av att olika professioner, på olika sätt betonat vikten av att bygga relationer med elever för att gynna en inkluderande verksamhet. Resultatet har även visat att fritidspersonalens förutsättningar påverkas av ledningens förståelse för fritids huvudsakliga uppdrag. I vår diskussion har delar av resultaten blivit bekräftade av den tidigare forskningen. Men det har även påvisats att det krävs en vidareutveckling utav personalens strukturer och arbetssätt på skolorganisationsnivå., The concept of inclusion is not something that is raised verbatim in the curriculum. Despite this, the curriculum’s wording can be understood as meaning that the staff at the school should start from an approach that aims to include all students. The purpose of this case study is to research the leisure-time center’s work with students in need of support from a holistic perspective. By carrying out a qualitative case study at one school using the methods of interviews and observations, we have been able to examine the leisure-time center’s work with students in need of support from this holistic perspective. The holistic perspective in our research means that we researched the thoughts and experiences of different professionals. The previous research we have chosen to use are research that highlight the conditions, relationships and the concept of inclusion from different perspectives. Among other things, the research contributes by elucidating the meaning of the broad concept of inclusion from different points of view. Through the relational and psychosocial perspective, we were given an opportunity to carry out a deeper analysis based on our question formulations. Together, the perspectives provide a broad view of how relationships, communication and the environment impact students in need of support. The analysis of our results has shown a consistent red thread of how relations play an important role in working with students in need of support. The consistent red thread has consisted of different professions, in different ways, emphasizing the importance of building relationships with students in order to favor an inclusive activity. The results have also shown that the leisure staff’s conditions are affected by management’s understanding of leisure’s main mission. In our discussion, parts of the results have been confirmed by the previous research. But it has also been shown that a further development of the staff’s structures and working methods at the school o

Funded as part of project FOE20-0017.

In this paper, we introduce the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC). SLEC is a recently compiled learner corpus containing argumentative texts written by Swedish junior and senior high school students. The first version of SLEC includes 1,098 texts with a total of 481,155 words. SLEC provides rich metadata on the students’ background, making it possible to empirically study relations between the linguistic properties of student texts and various extralinguistic and learner variables. What sets SLEC apart from many other learner corpora is the fact that it contains detailed information about the students’ extramural English (EE) activities (i.e., English-language activities that students engage in outside of the classroom). Specifically, the corpus includes information on how many hours per week students (i) read in English, (ii) watch TV shows or movies in English, (iii) engage in conversations in English, (iv) use social media with English content, and (v) communicate in English while playing computer/video games. In addition, a subset of SLEC has been orthographically cleaned to allow for higher accuracy in terms of (i) lexical searches, (ii) type-token counts, and (iii) automatic identification of syntactic complexity features. SLEC also includes a subset that has been assessed for proficiency using the CEFR scale. In the paper, we will describe the compilation process and give a detailed presentation of the metadata included. We will also discuss and exemplify different ways in which the corpus can be used by both students and researchers.

Frequent engagement in English extramural activities (i.e., activities that take place outside the classroom) has been found to have a positive impact on EFL learners’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. In the present study, we aim to extend our knowledge of the possible impact of extramural activities into the realm of second-language writing. Specifically, we investigate the relationship among a number of English extramural activities and two aspects of writing development: lexical diversity and noun phrase complexity. The data are drawn from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC) which includes texts produced by Swedish secondary school students. The corpus also includes information on how many hours per week students (i) engage in conversations in English, (ii) communicate in English while playing computer/video games, (iii) read in English, (iv) spend time on social media with English content, (v) and watch TV shows or movies in English. The results show that reading in English leads to higher frequency of adjectival modification, whereas conversing in English and watching TV programs positively impact lexical diversity. The results of the study have implications for discussions about the role of L2 classroom instruction vis-à-vis learners’ extramural activities.

In 1953, two individuals were excavated in Erik XIII’s alley, Visby, Gotland. After the excavation, the individuals did not undergo an osteological examination and were preserved for several years by the Gotland Museum. These two individuals were selected for this thesis to undergo an osteological analysis. The purpose of the essay was to identify and investigate the two individuals from Erik XIII's alley and illuminate the Viking age of Visby. A spatial analysis of Erik XIII's alley and the surrounding environment was carried out, to emphasize Visby’s Viking-age. Erik XIII's alley is in the northern part of Visby's inner city and is within walking distance of the two largest Viking-era burial grounds in Visby, Kopparsvik and Gustavsvik. Individual 1, who was judged to be a man, was approximately 182cm tall and was between 33-45 years old when he died. Individual 2 was judged to be a probable man and was between 17-25 at the time of his death and had an approximate length of 173cm. The individuals have only two common pathologies, which are osteophytes and tartar. Individual 2 had significantly fewer pathologies than individual 1, which may be a side effect of the age difference between them. In individual 1, enthesopathies were also identified, which were roughly consistent throughout the body, ligamente flava, pitting and osteoarthritis. Individual 2 showed changes from two different deficiency diseases, cribra orbitalia and enamel hypoplasia. The discussion is divided into three parts that emphasize the individuals, the comparison with other Viking-era individuals on Gotland and the spatial context. The individuals' pathologies are discussed, and possible interpretations of the individuals are presented. When the individuals from Erik XIII's alley are compared to other Viking-age individuals who have undergone osteological examinations, the result mainly varies. In the spatial context, possible interpretations of the graves are presented, which consist of an addi

The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA first release) is the result of an international corpus compilation project that aims to address the lack of large-scale, open access, multi-L1, multi-discipline and multi-register learner corpora. This corpus report provides a detailed description of VESPA and illustrates possible uses of the corpus for register exploration of learner data. Specifically, it first offers an overview of the makeup of the corpus and the online interface that can be used to search and download the corpus. It then gives an illustrative example of a study where multi-dimensional analysis was used to investigate the relative importance of register vis-à-vis other factors in learner academic writing. In the concluding remarks, we identify priorities for future developments in the VESPA project, including the addition of more L1 components, more disciplines and more registers, as well as the compilation of a comparable corpus of native student writing.

Despite being a rich source of information about potential syntactic first-language (L1) transfer, studies of adverb placement in second-language (L2) users’ production are few and far between (though notable exceptions include Rankin, 2010, Hasselgård, 2015, and Larsson et al., 2020). What is more, existing research has tended to focus on misplaced adverbs in written data and rarely considered factors such as mode, adverb type, and the linguistic context surrounding the adverb of interest. The present study starts out where previous studies left off and looks at adverb placement in intermediate to advanced learners’ spoken language production, as outlined below. In Larsson et al.’s (2020) study on adverb placement in academic writing, only minor differences were noticed across L1 and L2 production, which led the authors to conclude that while certain traces of L1 transfer persisted, L2 writers seem to have largely mastered adverb placement in English. However, the production circumstances of formal writing are such that there is ample opportunity for pre-planning and post-editing of the text, while online spoken language production offers no or very limited opportunities of this sort. It is thus reasonable to expect that effects of L1 transfer might still be discernable in spoken data. Furthermore, Larsson et al. (2020) found linguistic features (e.g., subject type, presence/absence of auxiliary) to be more important predictors of adverb placement in writing than extralinguistic factors (e.g., L1 background). It is unclear whether we can expect these patterns to hold true also in speech. Against this background, the present study sets out to explore two research questions: • What extralinguistic (e.g., L1 background) and linguistic factors (e.g., verb type, presence/absence of auxiliaries) help predict the positional distribution of the adverbs investigated in the spoken production of L1 and L2 students? • What evidence (if any) of L1 transfer is found in spoken la

This study investigates (i) whether there has been a shift towards increased statistical focus in corpus linguistic research articles, and if so, (ii) whether it has had any repercussions for the attention paid to linguistic description. This is done through an analysis of the relative focus on statistical reporting vs. linguistic description in the way the results are reported and discussed in research articles published in four major corpus linguistics journals in 2009 and 2019. The results display a marked change: In 2009, a clear majority of the articles exhibit a preference for linguistic description over statistical reporting; in 2019, the exact opposite is true. The number of different statistical techniques employed has also gone up. While the increased statistical focus may reflect increased methodological sophistication, our results show that it has come at a cost: A diminished focus on linguistic description, evident, for example, through fewer text excerpts and linguistic examples, appear to be symptomatic of increasing distance from the language that is the object of study. We discuss these shifts and suggest some ways of employing sophisticated statistical techniques without sacrificing a focus on language.

Editorship for special issue of Applied Corpus Linguistics