A consensus exists in applied linguistics that agency and identity are key concepts in understanding teacher development. Although a large body of research has focused on studying language teacher and learner identity and agency separately, less attention has been paid to the relationship of these concepts in individual development. In this…

This review covers recent applied linguistic research in Finland and Sweden during the years 2006-2011, with particular emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching. Its primary aim is to inform the international research community on the type of research that is going on in these countries. Special attention is given to topics which have…

Methodological problems caused by an ethnocentric view in analyzing another culture are discussed along with some aspects of culture analysis in general and stereotypes about other cultures and their functions in cross-cultural communication. It is suggested that miscommunication is subject to various norms and value systems that are not made…

This paper examines points in oral test interviews where an interviewee explicitly seeks clarification from the interviewer on the content of a question posed, prior to attempting to answer a question. Some of the interviews are drawn from the Finnish Foreign Language Diploma for Professional Purposes examination (Tyoelaman kielidiplomi); others…

In four experiments studying the think-aloud method, two first-year and two fifth-year students of translation were asked to produce a written translation from English into Finnish. This paper discusses the differences in how the two levels of students used various sorts of reference material. The fifth-year students proved to be very skillful and…

Problems involving empirical research into written business communication in Finnish and English are examined. Some of the problems are shown to be obvious reasons for the scarcity of research in this field. Three issues are discussed: (1) problems in establishing sub-categories and classification of current written business communication; (2) the…

Three empirical studies concerning reflective and rote learning in Finnish schools are described. In the first, a questionnaire given to school beginners reveals that during their first 12 weeks of school the children's estimates of the excitement and pleasure of learning and their conception of the role of understanding in learning decrease. The…

A planned 3-year joint project of the Nordic research council for the humanities that focuses on writing development in school-age children is described. Four Nordic countries are involved in the project: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the study, discourse-level performance analyses of student writing in English as a Second Language are…

The two volumes of these working papers include articles by linguists from Scandinavia and other parts of the world. Under the heading, "The Use of IT in Grammatical Analysis/Parsing" are five articles: "Creating Inflecting Electronic Thesauri"; "Tagging Speech Data--Constraint Grammar Analysis of Spoken Portuguese";…

A collection of 17 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Present Trends in Contrastive Linguistics,""Contrastive Linguistics in Bulgaria,""Communicative Competence in Foreign Language Teaching: A Project Report,""From Traditional…