Bøger af Michael (Columbia University New York) Burger

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, University of Augsburg (Phil-Hist Fakultät), course: Teaching and Learning English Pronunciation, language: English, abstract: In the course of the last three decades a whole new prominence has been granted to the significance of foreign language (FL) learning. Due to the recent development of globalization, further emerging of multi-national enterprises and the coalescence of the European Union, this appears to be the logical consequence. Because of its nowadays widely accepted status as a lingua franca (Acar 2006) the learning and teaching of English as the most frequently spoken second language has gained importance ¿ in Germany as well as in most industrialized countries speaking prevalently another first language (L1). In the recent past, since the end of the 19th century, changing trends have focused on different methods of language teaching, such as the ability to translate texts, correct use of grammar, or wide range of vocabulary. However, the teaching of English pronunciation finally has come back into the focus of interest since the second half of the 1980s due to the mentioned economic and social changes. Nowadays the ability to (net-) work internationally ¿ and thus reach the ¿ultimate goal of communication with other speakers of the second language¿ (Brown 1994: 226) seems to be one of the highest goals of achievement of second language (L2) learning. During the time of almost one century of pronunciation teaching the attitude towards the issue has changed as well: as Chun (1991: 179) states in her article, the development started from a segmental and comparative sound repetition learning strategy, followed by a period of simply ignoring the topic completely from the 1960s to the early 1980s, leading finally to the up-to-date approach of teaching suprasegmentals, sentence intonation as well as other aspects of connected speech. The most current approach towards second language teaching lies, according to Neri, Cucchiarini and Strik (2006: 357), in ¿the achievement of communicative effectiveness¿. This means that learners do not necessarily have to eradicate the slightest traces of foreign accent in their productions of L2 speech but are trained to avoid serious pronunciation errors.

Examination Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,5, University of Augsburg (Neue Englische Literaturen und Kulturwissenschaft), course: New English Literatures, language: English, abstract: The relationship between a mother and her children has been a prominent topic in literatureever since the genre of written fiction has become popular in the past. Mother figuresfrom Jocasta in the ancient Greek tragedy King Oedipus and Gertrude in theShakespeare classic Hamlet to Norma Bates in the 20th century suspense novel Psycho,to name but a few, have thrilled the audience as well as given critics a diverse subject todeal with. One reason for this ongoing fascination over centuries of literary productionmay lie in the extraordinarily complex relationship structure which can be developedbetween a mere dyad of people who happen to be mother and child. Yet, another reasonfor the perpetual re-invention of the issue can be found in its apparent comprehensibility:every human being has a biological mother and gets socialized by at least one focalperson of reference which enables them to relate to the fictional stories easily. Theunique quality of mothers in this process ¿ as plain as it sounds ¿ still is their ability tobear children, and by this act to establish an irreplaceable link to another human being.In the twentieth century, the socio-anthropological development has created amyriad of new possibilities and demographic changes that consequently were to findtheir way into literature and even have created new genres. Due to ¿significant shifts[¿] in attitudes towards sexuality¿ (Allan 10), technological advance, and demographicchanges, a whole new range of potential life-styles has evolved since the end of WorldWar II. This involved deconstruction of a traditional middle-class myth, namely thebreaking up of the nuclear family¿s near-monopoly position has ultimately led to an¿increasing diversity occurring in family and household patterns¿ (Allan 10). Consequently,issues like working mothers, single-parent families, step-families, or same-sexcouples adopting children have also enriched literary production of the past fifty years.Additionally to this, the increase of migration to the western industrialized societies hascaused a development of a wider ethnic diversity than before the turn of the century.Especially in the United States of America this influx of new potential authors becamethe cornerstone of a prolific process which has been producing works apart from Americanmainstream literature and still continues to do so.[...]

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Augsburg (New English Literatures and Cultural Studies), course: Japanese Canadian and Japanese American Literature, language: English, abstract: A proverb says: ¿War does not determine who is right, just who is left¿. Left, that isnaturally the veterans who managed not to get killed in battle and thus survived theirmission. But left, that is also the ones who refused fighting in a war for their country,for whatever the reason. War and its aftermaths clearly do not take a decision on whichof the two behaviors is right. It just leaves the involved people opposing each other contrarily¿ like left and right.In John Okadäs novel No-No Boy, almost all of its characters are immediatelyconfronted with the previously mentioned discord. Set in the Seattle of 1945, No-NoBoy deals with the outer and inner conflicts of a young Japanese American, namedIchiro, who refused the draft by a government, which in his eyes deprived him of hisidentity as an American. The narration starts with its central character, Ichiro, who hadjust arrived at a bus station in Seattle and now sees himself confronted with a drasticallychanged and diverse Japanese American community. By telling the story from Ichiro¿sperspective, Okada thereby convinces his audience with an authentic depiction of ¿aquest for self-identity under extreme circumstances¿ (Huang, 2006: 152) in this fragmentedand torn segment of society.Like his protagonist, Okada himself was an American-born son of Japanese immigrants,a so-called Nisei, and therefore also got evacuated from his hometown Seattleduring the war years. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Okada was in hismid-twenties and, unlike Ichiro in the novel, volunteered in the US Air Force, only toget discharged again directly after the war, in 1946 (see Huang, 2006: 152). Okadatherefore can be rated a prime source for rendering a Japanese-American community inSeattle which on the one hand ¿struggles with and seeks to recover from the disruptiveeffects of the internment¿ (Cheung & Peterson 195), and on the other hand has to dealwith the repercussions of a more or less forced recruitment. Moreover, during the progressof his book, Okada confronts the topic of racism and segregation in the UnitedStates with his ¿painful, powerful, and nuanced messages¿ (Huang, 2009: 768) ¿ someof which the United States of the 1950s were not yet ready for. [...]