This article describes a collaborative project involving the construction of a corpus of graded year 9 National Tests in written English. National Tests are standardized high stakes tests which are an important part of the Swedish education system because the results provide an indication of performance at national level, and also feed into pupils’ overall assessment. The grading of National Tests in written English has been found to be problematic for teachers, and a need for assessment training identified (Erickson and Tholin 2022). By providing a searchable database of graded written texts, together with the teacher feedback, this project aims to create a resource to support pre- and in-service teachers in interpreting knowledge requirements and assessment guidelines, and providing effective feedback. The corpus will also provide a resource for research into the features of student writing at different grade levels. To create the corpus, past papers from collaborating schools have been anonymized, digitized and coded. As a result, pupils’ texts can be easily sorted by a range of criteria, for example, year, gender, education type, grade achieved on the written paper and overall grade for the National Test. Teacher feedback can be accessed similarly. We outline potential research areas provided by this resource, and demonstrate how some of these might be explored. We also give examples of how the developing corpus has already been used as a resource for English teacher training programmes, and outline future plans for the project.
A careful consideration of Crimp’s choices throughout his career, especially since he expanded the scope of his work from translations to versions, adaptations and, later, libretti or “texts for music” (Angel-Perez 2014: 356), reveals that from the mid-1990s onwards he has taken a keen interest in the history of the narrative – whether as myth, dramatic text or popular story – alongside the history of civilization as embodied experience. Arguably, Crimp’s attachment to projects that could be seen as vehicles either for international directors (Benedict Andrews, Luc Bondy, Katie Mitchell) or composers (George Benjamin) has furnished the playwright with a richer understanding of how history is conceptualized as an active process in contemporary performance making, as well as of the gravitas and opportunities it carries. This is particularly notable when considering that the work of practitioners such as those mentioned above has also often operated on a delicate balance between the past and the present. Verbal and cultural sensibilities cannot be eradicated for the purposes of any new text, so a new version or adaptation cannot be dealt with merely as a vehicle for engaging in contemporary politics. That is, the older text’s rhythm, agenda and specificity cannot be sacrificed to create a reduced emergent product that only serves to vent present frustrations. Rather, the preexisting text must be paid due attention no less because allegory is a demanding process that requires sophisticated depths of mediation.
The text pays homage to Harold Pinter. It is not intended to be strictly in the format of the traditional academic article but, rather, blurs boundaries as it offers a perspective that emphasizes the sense of encounter with the writer in different ways. The purpose of the article is to add to the texts that have been written on Pinter from December 2008 onwards, considering his accomplishment as a writer and his strong political voice but also tracing the impact that his work has had on individual theatre scholars, using anecdotal incidents as the pathway to a broader narrative. It considers Pinter as a playwright, public speaker and, indeed, as a teacher—in the most meaningful and perhaps less obvious sense of the word.
In a statement when her tenure as the new artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, succeeding Dominic Cooke, was announced, Vicky Featherstone observed: ‘[t]hese are challenging times. Now more than ever we need places where reflection, question and visceral experience can elevate the daily and the private and remind us of our humanity and universality’.1 She added: ‘[t]he fearlessness and skill of our playwrights, [… along] with our complex and thrilling contemporary culture is a powerful combination’.2 Further to the key staples of the perspective she brings to a seminal new writing venue within the United Kingdom but also further afield, responsible for fostering the careers of many major playwrights of the recent and contemporary period, Featherstone used her early statement to reinforce the very significance of the playwright. At a time when debates relating to heavily mediatized performance and presumed tensions between playwright and director auteur are raging on, Featherstone allowed no ambiguity as to where she positions herself artistically. Through her words she emphasized that the Royal Court is not scared to advocate and support the primacy of the author. ‘It is the playwrights who find a story, form and structure […] and who breathe the life into ideas, thus demanding their urgent work be realized for an audience’, Featherstone continued.
The article examines Simon Stephens's seminal play Three Kingdoms (2012), a defining moment in his enduring working relationship with director Sebastian Nübling and a decidedly internationalist staging effort that enabled cross-collaboration between artists based in Britain, Estonia and Germany. The particular focus of the article is the depiction of animality in Simon Stephens's play and the rich signification that it accomplishes in a piece that effectively proceeds from the detective fiction genre to offer wide-ranging, bold and experimental theatrical representation. As the article argues, this is achieved through the poignant relevance to contemporary social concerns that animality allows on both a literal and metaphorical level. There is an imaginary binary at the heart of the problematics that Stephens exposes: between the European East and West, but also between human and animal. As the article goes on to demonstrate, Stephens, Nübling and their international team of collaborators arrive at a staging method that is both aesthetically intuitive and politically astute in order to offer rigorous stage commentary on the state of sex trade - and especially sex slavery - in our time. In so doing, they also powerfully question the primacy of humans over animals, raising important points as to vulnerability and transgression, the assumption of authority over nature, and also to humans in positions of power versus humans in positions of vulnerability.
This paper will focus on Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender, first performed at the Young Vic in the spring of 2004. The play is representative of Crimp's tendency to explore the fields of the private and the public in equal degrees, navigating both territories in the same text. It is, perhaps, features such as this that have triggered comparisons between Crimp and Pinter and it is true that, like Pinter, Crimp is a master of language and subterranean action. In this paper, I will argue that Crimp is equally effective in depicting private and public conflicts and I will demonstrate this by exploring the techniques which he employs in order to communicate the characters' tension and aggression, concluding that his subtle methods are highly effective. In terms of theory I will focus on Stanton Garner's Bodied Spaces, a phenomenological approach to performance. In doing so my purpose is mainly to indicate the value of phenomenology as a theoretical approach to Crimp's theatre for which Cruel and Tender will serve as an example.
This article focuses on Martin Crimp's collaborations with Katie Mitchell in the context of productions of plays that involve a process of translation and whose source language is German. Specifically, the article concentrates on the productions of Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner at the National Theatre in 2009 and of The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht at the Young Vic in 2007. The article offers a distinction when it comes to the terms adaptation, translation and version, before arguing that even in cases where Crimp has not produced a translation as such, but, rather, a version - as in the examples of these two texts - there is a substantial amount of translation involved. This translation is spatial, cultural, corporeal and indeed verbal, rendering the source text into a product that is responsive to a contemporary audience. Beginning with a consideration of The Jewish Wife, the article then goes on to examine in detail the methods through which Crimp and Mitchell delivered a modern staging of Pains of Youth that was entirely attuned to its modern-day context while remaining sensitive to its original cultural environment.
The essay discusses Tim Crouch’s recent play The Author (2009) in the context of active listening, audience participation, response and responsibility in contemporary theatre. It provides a critical engagement with the spectatorial experience of the piece so as to problematize the multiple uses of the physical medium of voice and speech in a contemporary play that delivers a fresh angle to narrativity and metatheatricality. At the same time, the essay probes the varied range of possibilities but also realistic extent of audience involvement in the play, tracing its deep textual contingencies to produce an overall understanding of the equally rewarding and precarious interrelationship between performance piece and audience.
In the summer of 2008, the Royal Court Theatre staged the type of eerie play that seems predestined to incite high emotions. Billed as ‘[n]ot recommended for anyone under the age of 16’ (Royal Court Theatre, 2008), Anthony Neilson’s Relocated only took 90 minutes to affect London theatre critics in different ways, in one notable case leading them to the point of exasperation.1 In his review Michael Billington described the play as ‘repellent’, adding that in his opinion this was inextricably linked to the ‘hideously inappropriate’ disconnection between form and subject matter (2008). From Billington’s viewpoint, Neilson’s choice of using a ‘Gothic thriller format’ as the representational vehicle for violence against children was sensationalistic and beyond justification. Even in the context of Billington’s emphasis on detail and explication (emerging consistently if we examine his reviews of certain contemporary plays that follow a dramatically unconventional path), the question of ‘to what end we were being scared other than to give us a morbidly indecent thrill and to tickle our jaded theatrical appetites’ still rings relevant. Can it be that the feeling embossed in the play’s form and content is that of a desperate desire to convince us to care — a controversial attempt to entice an audience exposed to multiple options, spectacles and interpretations by combining a subject that is guaranteed to stir emotions with a dramatic method that was certain to escalate them?
The aim of this study was to find out if there were any detectable differences in the language and language use between children who had been at home with an adult, versus children who had been at day care regularly before they started school. Eight six-year-olds, four from each group, were interviewed and their answers compared to each other. The results pointed to a slight difference in word choices and sentence structure and also a greater difference in the past tense verb forms. Children with a day care background tended to discuss and interact more with their peers, though with simpler sentences and several incorrect verb forms, while the stay-at-home children used more complex sentences and had a higher rate of correct past tense verb forms. The conclusion from this study suggests that children need both adult and peer input to develop correct language and the necessary skills for interaction.
In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with pied-piped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.
This article deals with the different semiotic functions of complex car color names in Swedish. Based on a body of 150 authentic name types, collected from both newspapers and manufacturers' catalogues, the study looks into the properties of these names from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, discussing aspects such as morphological structure, information value, and status thinking as they apply to the data. The results of the analysis demonstrate that such color terminology is used to serve both descriptive and amplifying purposes, indicating that there is a complex interaction between physical and cultural aspects in the domain of car color semiosis. As a corollary of the patterns derived, it is argued that the car industry often seems to prefer connotation to denotation as its main color naming strategy.
Ämnesdidaktik är ett centralt kompetensområde för skolors praktiska verksamheter. Studier utförs inom skilda discipliner, men vilken konkret, ny kunskap genereras och hur synliggörs den? I denna studie sammanförs olika teoretiska synsätt och metodologiska ansatser inom ämnesdidaktik och vissa didaktiska aspekter reanalyseras för att tillvarata och konkretisera kunskaper utifrån tre empiriska studier med relevans för språkdidaktik. Vi exemplifierar hur de sammantaget kan ligga till grund för didaktisk verksamhet i allmänhet och språkdidaktik i synnerhet. Studien grundas på en explorativ design. Med en språklig och diskursiv analys jämför vi egenskaper och resultat från tre avhandlingar, samt analyserar samband och skillnader. Slutsatserna är att språkdidaktik rymmer liknande komplexitet som allmändidaktik. Följande gemensamma faktorer av avgörande betydelse kan skönjas; multimodalitet, medvetna metodiska val, kognitiva utmaningar, metakognitiv utveckling i interaktionen språk och tanke, motivation och intresse utifrån elevernas verkligheter, individualisering och samspel, funktionalitet och retorisk flexibilitet i språkkunskaper samt vikten av lärares reflekterande färdigheter. Studien a) pekar på möjligheter med ett multi- och transdisciplinärt, forskande förhållningssätt inom ämnesdidaktik, b) bidrar till integrering av forskning och skolpraktik c) sätter språkdidaktik i förgrunden i ett pragmatiskt perspektiv samt d) betonar samspelet mellan olika ämnesdidaktiska perspektiv.
The reading ability among today’s children and youth is highly discussed both nationally and internationally. The results for Swedish students, in both PIRLS and PISA, show a decrease in reading ability. There are different explanations to the decrease, for example deficiency in teaching and a reduction in the use of reading strategies. While a lot of research is being devoted to reading development, there is a lack on research showing overall constructive ways to build and maintain favorable reading environments for each individual. Our aim with this paper is to discuss what will work on an individual basis. Our research question is: Which are the key-factors that create good reading environments and maintain a sustainable reading interest on an individual level? The overall purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the field of research on early reading, with a special focus on good reading environments, individual conditions, reading styles and teaching strategies. The aim is to identify how good reading environments can be developed through children’s individual reading styles and strategies, and teacher’s awareness of teaching strategies that create an optimal platform for lifelong reading. This paper is a conceptual paper in which a theoretical framework built on international empirical research was identified, by connecting and systematizing different parts of reading, learning and teaching. This area is complex and complicated because it involves interactions and different learning and teaching perspectives. In this paper we present research showing that teaching reading based on individual reading styles and strategies is an effective way to ensure children’s´ achievement, interest, self-confidence, and motivation. Children’s awareness of reading strategies supported by favorable reading environments influence meta-cognition and also the ability and interest to become a skilled reader. It is also clear that teachers’ pedagogical knowledge is of great importance as well as their ability to use a variety of teaching strategies to meet the needs of every individual. This paper provides useful information unraveling concepts, methods and effects which can aid children, parents, teachers and researchers in understanding, evaluating and monitoring reading, thus having practical implications for promoting lifelong reading.
Forskning om grammatikdidaktik lever ett mycket tyst liv. De senaste femton åren kan endast ett tiotal böcker, artiklar och avhandlingar spåras i vårt land. Med de nya läroplanerna framskrivs färdigheter och kunskaper i vårt språk och även i grammatiken. I denna artikel belyser vi framför allt grammatikdidaktikens hur-fråga utifrån ett språk- och utbildningsvetenskapligt fokus samt beprövad erfarenhet. Syftet är att visa hur man oberoende av grammatikteoretiskt perspektiv kan individualisera undervisningen med hjälp av kunskaper om elevernas lärstilspreferenser. Vi diskuterar grammatikdidaktik utifrån en breddad metodisk ansats och pläderar för en ny, vetenskapligt underbyggd modell för en lärstilsanpassad grammatikundervisning. Därmed vill vi väcka till liv den långdragna numera något insomnade debatten om grammatikens ställning inom svenskämnet. Dessutom vill vi generera en metodisk modell, applicerbar inom svenskämnets didaktik, för att bättre anpassa undervisningen till elevers styrkor och behov.
A research strategy that only focuses on students and their learning styles and does not place them within a pedagogic context only provides a fragmentary image of students’ learning. To be able to achieve a comprehensive picture of learning, all three variables in the “didactic” triangle have to be taken into account: the students, teacher and the subject have to be evaluated. The aim of this study is to learn more about teachers' perceptions of their own grammar teaching. This study is a continuation of research into learning styles and grammar in school. The first part of the study focused on the retention of students, whereas this study focuses on the adults' stories about grammar in school. The study’s theoretical framework is based on didactic research on Swedish grammar teaching. The focus of the study is important not only because grammar is considered to be both difficult to learn and difficult to teach, but also because knowledge of grammar is now explicitly expressed in steering documents that include clear aims.