Challenging From Within : Youth Associations and Female Leadership in Swedish Mosques

This chapter focuses on women members of the Sunnī-dominated national organization Sweden's Young Muslims (Sveriges Unga Muslimer, SUM) and some of its local youth associations in different Swedish towns, to argue that involvement with these associations is increasing Muslim women's engagement with mosques and other venues for acquisition of Islamic knowledge. Illuminating the continuous challenges to the women's presence in mosques and their wider public activism the chapter examines how these women defend their right to exercise religious authority while supporting the traditional sources of Muslim authority in the public sphere. It analyzes how the women reinterpret the Islamic texts to change their daily lives as well as their position within both the Muslim community and Swedish society as a whole. The chapter emphasizes that in more informal situations, backstage among peers, the women put gender on the agenda, initiate reflexive deliberations, and test alternative norms and practices.

Climate and causation in the Swedish Iron Age : Learning from the present to understand the past

The paper reassesses the role of climate as a factor shaping changes in settlement and landscape in the Swedish Iron Age (500 BC to AD 1050). Two reasons motivate this re-evaluation. First, high-resolution data based on climate proxies from the natural sciences are now increasingly available. Second, the climate-related social sciences have yielded conceptual and theoretical developments regarding vulnerability and adaptability in the present and recent past, creating new ways to analyse the effects of climatic versus societal factors on societies in the more distant past. Recent research in this field is evaluated and the explicitly climate deterministic standpoint of many recent natural science texts is criticized. Learning from recent approaches to climate change in the social sciences is crucial for understanding society–climate relationships in the past. The paper concludes that we are not yet in a position to fully evaluate the role of the new evidence of abrupt climate change in 850 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Regarding the crisis in the mid first millennium AD, however, new climate data indicate that a dust veil in AD 536–537 might have aggravated the economic and societal crisis known from previous research.

Without a trace? The Sámi in the Swedish History Museum

Around 2005, the Swedish History Museum (SHM) in Stockholm reworked their Vikings exhibition, aiming to question simplistic and erroneous understandings of past group identities. In the process, all references to the Sámi were removed from the exhibition texts. This decision has been criticised by experts on Sámi pasts. In this article, it is argued that we can talk about a Sámi ethnic identity from the Early Iron Age onwards. The removal of references to the Sámi in the exhibition texts is discussed accordingly, as well as the implicit misrepresentations, stereotypes and majority attitudes that are conveyed through spatial distribution, choice of illustrations, lighting, colour schemes and the exhibition texts. Finally, some socio-political reasons for the avoidance of Sámi issues in Sweden are suggested, including an enduring colonialist relation to this minority.

Bringing a German voice to English-speaking readers: Spiegel International

Translation is a regular phenomenon for news production, even if this is not always explicitly indicated. It is quite common that journalists themselves perform translations in their text production processes. Online media have added new possibilties to these processes. This paper looks at the transfer between print and online media texts from the point of view of translation. On the basis of case studies of English translations made available online by Spiegel International, the text production practice and its reflection in the linguistic structure of the translations is illustrated. The declared aim of putting English translations on the Spiegel website is to bring its 'unique voice' to English-speaking readers. This paper argues that this 'unique voice' will not be seen by the readers in the actual linguistic make-up of the texts, but that it is as a result of the text selection process that English-speaking readers can get access to a different point of view.

'I felt that I do live in the UK now':international students' self-reports of their English language speaking experiences on a pre-sessional programme

This article focuses on the English language experiences of a group of pre-sessional students, an under-represented group in the literature on language and education. In particular, it investigates the opportunities that such students have to use English outside the classroom, shown to be a key factor in student satisfaction with their study abroad experience. Drawing on data from questionnaires, interviews and on-line diaries, we show that students have a variety of opportunities to use English; however, these opportunities may require students to engage in complex negotiations right from the beginning of their sojourn in the UK. Micro-analysis of the data shows that agency is a key construct in understanding students' representations of their English encounters as they begin their lives in the UK. The article concludes with some suggestions as to how pre-sessional courses may develop students' linguistic and socio-cultural skills in order that they may interact successfully in English outside the classroom. © 2011 Taylor &Francis.

Speaking and pronunciation

We take as our starting point the notion of spoken language in use, drawing on insights from discourse analysis which makes it clear that language is used to negotiate and achieve meaning in social contexts and so cannot be divorced from those contexts. This perspective tasks us beyond a purely psycholinguistic model of speech where underlying mental processes are highlighted (e.g. Levelt, 1989). The perspective also takes us beyond the focus on the sentence, which has traditionally been the unit of analysis in much grammatical analysis and language teaching.

An Experimental investigation into the reading ability transfer of Chinese speaking learners of english

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Speaking out of turn? Taking the initiative in teacher-fronted classroom interaction.

Teacher-fronted interaction is generally seen to place limitations on the contributions that learners can make to classroom discourse and the conclusion is that learners are unable to experiment with, for example, turn-taking mechanisms. This article looks at teacher-fronted interaction in the language classroom from the perspective of learner talk by examining how learners might take the initiative during this apparently more rigid form of interaction. Detailed microanalysis of classroom episodes, using a conversation analysis institutional discourse approach, shows how learners orient to the institutional context to make sophisticated and effective use of turn-taking mechanisms to take the initiative and direct the interaction, even in the controlled environment of teacher-fronted talk. The article describes some of the functions of such learner initiative, examines how learners and teachers co-construct interaction and how learners can create learning opportunities for themselves. It also briefly looks at teacher reactions to such initiative. The article concludes that learner initiative in teacher-fronted interaction may constitute a significant opportunity for learning and that teachers should find ways of encouraging such interaction patterns.