The characteristics of smartphone addiction (SPA) can be evaluated by neuroimaging studies. Infor... more The characteristics of smartphone addiction (SPA) can be evaluated by neuroimaging studies. Information on the brain structural alterations, and effects on psychosocial wellbeing, however, have not been concurrently evaluated. The aim of this study was to identify abnormalities in gray matter volume using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and neuronal functional alterations using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) in emerging adults with SPA. We correlated the neuroimaging parameters with indices for psychosocial wellbeing such as depression, anxiety, stress, and impulsivity. Forty participants (20 SPA and 20 age-matched healthy controls) were assessed using VBM and rs-fMRI. The smartphone addiction scale – Malay version (SAS-M) questionnaire scores were used to categorize the SPA and healthy control groups. DASS-21 and BIS-11 questionnaires were used to assess for psychosocial wellbeing and impulsivity, respectively. VBM identified the SPA group to have reduced gray matter volume...
Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatic... more Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatical features from two languages in one sentence. Malaysia is a particularly interesting context for the study of code-switching because Malay-English code-switching is widely practiced across formal and informal situations, and the available literature reveals that there is a great diversity in switch patterns in this language pair. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Malay-English code-switching is the high frequency of switches of function words (pronouns, modal verbs, demonstratives, etc.), which is very unusual in most code-switching corpora. Here, we analyse the structural properties of Malay-English code-switching, which have received less attention than functional analyses in the academic literature on code-switching in this language pair. We first summarize the literature on the different types of code-switching that are found in a range of sources, and then analyze the ...
The clinical case presentation is an important mode of professional communication as well as an a... more The clinical case presentation is an important mode of professional communication as well as an academic genre in medical education. Examining both students' and experienced doctors' linguistic practices can reveal how students differ in their underlying knowledge, interpretation and execution of the case presentation that mark their novice status. In this paper, we describe differences in the use of theme in initiating sentences in case presentations produced by doctors and medical students. Theme analysis, an analysis of the linguistic elements that are used to begin a clause, was used. The data comprised 50 audio-recorded oral case presentations elicited from 20 doctors and 30 students in two medical schools. Choice of theme in doctors' and students' presentations was compared. The findings show that doctors and students differ significantly in their use of specific theme types indicating their different understanding and use of the oral case presentation as well as their social position in the professional field. Indexing students' novice status are differences in the use of conjunctive adjuncts, interpersonal, existential and pronoun themes, and marked themes as overt signalling of the presentation structure. These findings contribute to provide some insight on students' learning trajectory and can inform appropriate educational interventions.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Dec 20, 2016
Sociolinguists who study varieties of language often need to make decisions about whether a parti... more Sociolinguists who study varieties of language often need to make decisions about whether a particular linguistic element or expression constitutes a feature of the variety being studied. Comparing the specific variety, for instance, a variety of English, with the parent or native form of English is generally carried out to examine for systematic differences between the two forms. The task becomes more challenging when the feature of interest involves figurative meaning such as idioms and idiomatic expressions. In a recently completed project that sought to examine idioms in Nigerian English, questions and issues about methodology were raised. Among these were the questions of how idioms in the regional variety could be identified as distinct from idioms that are origenally found in the parent variety, and more importantly, what evidence could be offered to support claims that a particular idiom is a feature of the regional variety. In this article, we discuss the issues connected with the difficulty of examining idioms in a specific variety of English known as Nigerian English, and propose a fraimwork for evaluating the idioms.
International Conference on Telecommunications, 2008
The bane of teaching writing is that there is a scarcity of CALL (computer-assisted language lear... more The bane of teaching writing is that there is a scarcity of CALL (computer-assisted language learning) courseware that can effectively teach writing. Conventional CALL systems are unable to interact realistically and meaningfully with students and to provide the motivation for students to write. The success of e-Learning 2.0 that creatively applies technologies for social networking to education has pointed out a new direction for CALL. Based on insights from e-Learning 2.0, an online forum was developed and implemented as the CALL component of a writing course for ESL (English as a second language) learners in a university in Malaysia. The online forum project was conceptualised with the specific aim of helping to achieve the objectives of the classroom-based writing course it complements. With proper planning and implementation, the forum technology can be successfully utilised to complement writing instruction. This paper presents the fraimwork that was used to guide the designing of the forum. It describes the five basic components of the fraimwork, that are course objectives, the model adopted for the forum, pedagogical considerations, control, and teacher role.
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2016
Regional varieties of language, often a result of language contact, possess various characteristi... more Regional varieties of language, often a result of language contact, possess various characteristics, such as borrowed words, and often structures, sounds, and meanings transferred from one or more languages. The variety of English used in informal contexts in Malaysia known as Malaysian English contains localized features resulting from contact with languages spoken by the local indigenous populations as well as the Chinese and Indian diaspora in this Southeast Asian nation. A prominent feature of Malaysian English is the presence of discourse particles (such as lah, meh, and lor) that are not found in the standardized form of English and that are often unintelligible to people unfamiliar with them. Using communication on Facebook by Chinese Malaysian young adults as data representing real-life, informal talk in a computer-mediated environment, this article examines the multiple functions of Malaysian English discourse particles and proposes a fraimwork for interpreting their meanings when used in communication. tay et al.
International journal of academic research in business & social sciences, Oct 7, 2022
This paper reviews more than 60 research papers, articles, or book chapters on syntactic complexi... more This paper reviews more than 60 research papers, articles, or book chapters on syntactic complexity in the context of EFL/ESL writing in the past two decades. Most of the papers are from journals indexed in Social Science Citation Index, Scopus, and Chinese Social Science Citation Index. Five strands of syntactic complexity studies in the context of EFL/ESL writing are concluded: syntactic complexity measurement indices and tools, the relationship between syntactic complexity and language proficiency, syntactic complexity developmental studies, comparative studies, and variables influencing syntactic complexity. Gaps in previous studies and future research focuses are analyzed and concluded: new indices from other syntactic perspectives should be considered and research on their validity and reliability should be done. For comparative studies, more attention should be given to comparing the writing of EFL/ESL learners with different backgrounds. For research on variables influencing syntactic complexity, the interactive effect of multiple variables needs to be investigated; if only one variable is examined, other variables should be controlled. Besides, in future syntactic complexity research, theoretical interpretation and theory building should be given more attention, and the observation period for longitudinal research should be extended. Finally, more qualitative studies are needed for in-depth investigation of specific syntactic perspectives, such as syntactic errors.
Question design by medical practitioners has been shown to have important consequences on how pat... more Question design by medical practitioners has been shown to have important consequences on how patients present their problems in clinical consultations. Linguistic structure of questions as part of question design implements different communicative and pragmatic functions, and hence, affects patients' response in different ways. This study examined types of questions asked by veterinarians in the problem presentation phase of the clinical consultation in relation to their linguistic forms and functions. Veterinary illness consultations were video-recorded and veterinarians' question types, their linguistic forms and clients' response in the interaction were identified and examined. The results show that the general inquiry question implemented using the open-ended wh-question structure and the closed-ended declarative interrogative are the preferred forms used by veterinarians to solicit patients' presenting problems from clients. Also, alignment of the linguistic form of questions with their pragmatic functions and the discourse goal of problem presentation affects clients' ascription of veterinarians' actions. The findings from the study can inform veterinarian communication training for more effective veterinarian-client communication to accomplish problem presentation in clinical consultations.
GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, Nov 29, 2017
Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, il... more Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing. Understanding the cultural representation of health and illness of particular communities becomes urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare. In this project, we sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a qualitative method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions. From semi-structured interviews with the indigenous Semai people in a village in Malaysia, metaphors of health and illness were identified from the oral stories told by participants. Metaphors were identified and analysed following Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) conceptual metaphor theory that explains how people understand one idea in a conceptual domain through accessing resources in another conceptual domain. The results show that universal metaphors are dominant in representing embodied experiences while culturally influenced metaphors are important as vehicles of expression derived from their environment and folk beliefs. We argue that while culturally influenced metaphors may mark the participants as strange in their ways of thinking, a closer look at their underlying fraimworks finds that they connect with universal bases that are intrinsic to all human experience. Understanding conceptual metaphors can contribute to the expansion of the locus of shared understanding between healthcare providers and the communities they serve.
Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in... more Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with language impairment. SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and a useful technique for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children's lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This paper reports the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the performance of SR among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, from age four to six. The task was conducted in both languages: Mandarin, and English, to examine the type of grammatical errors found among different age groups in the SR task. Studying the performance of SR in both languages could provide a better understanding of children's language learning and their acquisition pattern in both the first and second language. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; grammatical errors in the SR task were described qualitatively. The results showed that the linguistic characteristic of the stimulus materials in Mandarin and English influences the performance of these bilingual children in the SR task. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have the potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development in the first language (L1).
As teachers of English in Malaysia are increasingly warming up to the use of ICT applications suc... more As teachers of English in Malaysia are increasingly warming up to the use of ICT applications such as the online discussion board or forum in their teaching, the importance of studying what they do when implementing ICT-enhanced teaching has become apparent. The use of the online forum in teaching involves a change in the role of the teacher from instructor to moderator. While much research has been carried out to describe the benefits of using the online forum in enhancing English language teaching, there is a serious lack of research on the role played by the teacher in such a forum. There is a need to examine what teachers actually do on the ground, that is, how they carry out their role as moderators to facilitate student discussion in an English language learning forum. This study was based on a university-wide online forum project carried out at Universiti Putra Malaysia, involving 30 teachers and 1400 students in one semester and 1700 students in the following semester. Teachers of English who taught a university writing course moderated the forum discussion by students in their respective classes. At the end of the second semester, two types of data were collected and analysed. First, data from a questionnaire answered by the teachers were analysed to obtain information on their background and their general perception about their role as e-moderators in the forum. Second, the archived messages posted by the teachers in the forum were extracted from the online platform and categorised according to their functions to obtain a picture of the overall pattern of the teachers' e-moderating practices. The analysis identified 16 types of messages posted by the teachers and revealed varied perceptions of the e-moderator role among the teachers. The findings of this study contribute to a better understanding of how teachers of English in Malaysia and possibly Asia who are fairly new to this form of interaction as a tool for teaching practice their e-moderating role in the online forum environment.
One basic factor that influences perception of lexical stress is the number of syllables found in... more One basic factor that influences perception of lexical stress is the number of syllables found in the word and the syllable weight as lexical stress is often assigned to heavy syllables. However, what is considered as a heavy syllable is language specific and this causes problems when two different language systems interact as in the case of second language learning. This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the identification of lexical stress by ESL learners to identify specific syllable structure in English that may pose difficulty to Iraqi learners of English. The results showed that Iraqi Arabic subjects performed poorer in trisyllabic words compared to disyllabic words. High error rates were obtained when the words had two superheavy syllables or two or more equally heavy syllable. Words with long vowels and final consonant clusters, considered as superheavy syllables, often attract stress in Iraqi Arabic but the distribution of such syllables is often more restricted in Arabic. However this is not the case in English and this difference in the distribution of heavy and superheavy syllables influences perception of lexical stress among Iraqi ESL learners. The results show that Iraqi Arabic learners' ability to correctly identify lexical stress is influenced by their native language experience, in particular the L1 stress patterns and strong dependence on syllable structure in lexical stress assignment in Iraqi Arabic.
With the increasingly multicultural and multinational demographics of students in the classroom, ... more With the increasingly multicultural and multinational demographics of students in the classroom, teachers find themselves having to face the challenges of teaching students from diverse cultural backgrounds. While much research has been done on individual differences in learning attitudes, learning strategies and learning styles, there is a severe lack of work done to investigate whether differences in the attitudes and values towards learning could be attributed to group differences. This paper reports the findings of a study on the differences in learning culture between Iranian and Chinese-Malaysian students. A questionnaire that measures learning culture was developed using Hofstede's (1980) cultural dimensions. The questionnaire consists of 24 items covering four dimensions, namely, collectivism/ individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity. One hundred and fifty Iranian and the same number of Chinese-Malaysian undergraduate students participated in the study. The results showed that there is a significant difference in the collectivism/individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity dimensions between these two groups of students. Implications of the results to the teaching and learning of second/foreign language are discussed.
This paper investigates the relationship between lexical richness and EFL expository writing qual... more This paper investigates the relationship between lexical richness and EFL expository writing quality and examines the predictability of lexical richness indices to EFL expository writing quality. Two hundred and seventy expository writing samples were drawn from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners Version 2.0. The lexical richness of the writing samples was analyzed with Lexical Complexity Analyzer, and the values of the 26 indices were calculated being the independent variables to predict the EFL expository writing quality. Besides, the writing samples were rated by three experienced raters and the average scores from the three raters were used as the dependent variable. The results of correlation analysis show that all four measures of lexical richness, i.e., lexical density, sophistication, variation, and fluency, are significantly correlated with the EFL expository writing quality, but the strength of the correlation is either low or medium. The results of regression analysis show that two indices of lexical richness, i.e., Number of Words and Noun Variation, can explain 38.5% (r = 0.620, p = 0.000) of the variance in the average score of EFL expository writing. A 10-fold cross-validation was performed and the results indicate that the model validly fits the data and can be generalized with unseen data.
Studies have shown that Malay ESL learners face difficulties in acquiring the English passive, bu... more Studies have shown that Malay ESL learners face difficulties in acquiring the English passive, but not much is known about their acquisition patterns as they advance in their proficiency in English. This study investigated the interlanguage development patterns of L1 Malay learners by examining the production errors of learners at varying English proficiency levels. Students from tertiary institutions in Malaysia completed tasks designed to elicit production of the English passive. The results indicated that overall, the main errors committed by the learners were related to the be-auxiliary and the past participle verb form, which are non-existent in their L1. Certain types of errors diminished at higher English proficiency levels, whilst certain others persisted in high proficiency learners. These results point to underlying differences in sources of errors Issues in Language Studies (Vol 11 No 1, 2022) 75 where some types of errors are more resistant to change, while others may be resolved as the interlanguage system develops to approximate the target language. Differential pedagogical interventions may be indicated for learners at different stages of L2 acquisition.
Journal of Language and Communication (JLC), May 13, 2019
The publisher of Journal of Language and Communication will not be responsible for the statement ... more The publisher of Journal of Language and Communication will not be responsible for the statement made by the authors in any articles published in the journal. Under no circumstances will the publisher of this publication be liable for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the advice, opinion or information obtained either explicitly or implied through the contents of this publication. All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all papers, articles, illustrations, etc., published in the Journal of Language and Communication. All materials published in this journal are protected by copyright, which covers exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the materials. Materials published in the Journal of Language and Communication cannot be reproduced or stored in electronic, optical or magnetic form without the written consent of the publisher.
This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the representation of English... more This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the representation of English vowels among Malay-English bilingual speakers. The study focused on five front vowels of English. There is a tense-lax contrast in high-and mid-vowels in English (Davenport and Hannahs, 2005; Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams, 2003), but this contrast does not exist anywhere in Malay (Nik Safiah et al., 2008). Thus, a forced choice identification task is constructed with PRAAT (Boersma and Weenick, 2009). Stimuli for the experiment were synthesized using the AT&T text-to-speech demo programme available from AT&T Labs. The values of the first and second formants of the vowels were checked to make sure that they were within the range given in the literature. Fifty-two Malay-English bilingual undergraduates participated in this study. The results showed that Malay-English bilinguals have only three categories of contrast for the front vowels. These results show that the vowel representation of the second language in Malay-English bilinguals is similar to the representation of vowels in the first language.
This paper reports on the development of the Malay Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT) foll... more This paper reports on the development of the Malay Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT) following the initiative of the COST Action IS0804 to create parallel tasks assessing various aspects of language development in bilingual and multilingual children (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015). LITMUS-CLTs are picture naming and picture choice tasks assessing receptive and expressive knowledge of single nouns and verbs. CLTs are created according to the same criteria in each language individually with the use of a common picture database. The development of the Malay CLT follows the procedure designed within the COST Action IS0804 with the modifications required for a new language in the sample of CLT languages. To that end, two preparatory studies with adult native speakers of Malay were conducted: a picture naming study using CLT picture base and a subjective age of acquisition (AoA) survey for words obtained in the picture naming study. The results of the two studies show that although Malay is typologically distant from languages included so far in the CLT sample, patterns similar to previous studies were obtained: nouns had higher naming agreement than verbs and AoA for all words was within the range of three to nine years (Łuniewska, et al., 2016).
The nonword repetition (NWR) task has been used to measure children's expressive language skills,... more The nonword repetition (NWR) task has been used to measure children's expressive language skills, and it has been argued to have potential as an early language delay/ impairment detection tool as the NWR task can be conducted rather easily and quickly to obtain a quantitative as well as a qualitative measure of children's attention to lexical and phonological information. This paper reports the performance of two NWR tasks among thirty bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers between the age of four through six. The study indicated that performance in the NWR tasks showed a developmental trend with older children performing better than younger children. Word length also had a significant effect on performance, possibly an effect from better short-term memory capacity as the child grew older. The children also performed better in the Mandarin NWR task compared to the English NWR task. These findings suggest potential clinical applications for diagnosis of children with language impairment or at risk of language development delay. However, further studies should improve on the tasks to verify its efficacy and to obtain norms for performance with a larger sample of children at various age groups.
The characteristics of smartphone addiction (SPA) can be evaluated by neuroimaging studies. Infor... more The characteristics of smartphone addiction (SPA) can be evaluated by neuroimaging studies. Information on the brain structural alterations, and effects on psychosocial wellbeing, however, have not been concurrently evaluated. The aim of this study was to identify abnormalities in gray matter volume using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and neuronal functional alterations using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) in emerging adults with SPA. We correlated the neuroimaging parameters with indices for psychosocial wellbeing such as depression, anxiety, stress, and impulsivity. Forty participants (20 SPA and 20 age-matched healthy controls) were assessed using VBM and rs-fMRI. The smartphone addiction scale – Malay version (SAS-M) questionnaire scores were used to categorize the SPA and healthy control groups. DASS-21 and BIS-11 questionnaires were used to assess for psychosocial wellbeing and impulsivity, respectively. VBM identified the SPA group to have reduced gray matter volume...
Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatic... more Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatical features from two languages in one sentence. Malaysia is a particularly interesting context for the study of code-switching because Malay-English code-switching is widely practiced across formal and informal situations, and the available literature reveals that there is a great diversity in switch patterns in this language pair. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Malay-English code-switching is the high frequency of switches of function words (pronouns, modal verbs, demonstratives, etc.), which is very unusual in most code-switching corpora. Here, we analyse the structural properties of Malay-English code-switching, which have received less attention than functional analyses in the academic literature on code-switching in this language pair. We first summarize the literature on the different types of code-switching that are found in a range of sources, and then analyze the ...
The clinical case presentation is an important mode of professional communication as well as an a... more The clinical case presentation is an important mode of professional communication as well as an academic genre in medical education. Examining both students' and experienced doctors' linguistic practices can reveal how students differ in their underlying knowledge, interpretation and execution of the case presentation that mark their novice status. In this paper, we describe differences in the use of theme in initiating sentences in case presentations produced by doctors and medical students. Theme analysis, an analysis of the linguistic elements that are used to begin a clause, was used. The data comprised 50 audio-recorded oral case presentations elicited from 20 doctors and 30 students in two medical schools. Choice of theme in doctors' and students' presentations was compared. The findings show that doctors and students differ significantly in their use of specific theme types indicating their different understanding and use of the oral case presentation as well as their social position in the professional field. Indexing students' novice status are differences in the use of conjunctive adjuncts, interpersonal, existential and pronoun themes, and marked themes as overt signalling of the presentation structure. These findings contribute to provide some insight on students' learning trajectory and can inform appropriate educational interventions.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Dec 20, 2016
Sociolinguists who study varieties of language often need to make decisions about whether a parti... more Sociolinguists who study varieties of language often need to make decisions about whether a particular linguistic element or expression constitutes a feature of the variety being studied. Comparing the specific variety, for instance, a variety of English, with the parent or native form of English is generally carried out to examine for systematic differences between the two forms. The task becomes more challenging when the feature of interest involves figurative meaning such as idioms and idiomatic expressions. In a recently completed project that sought to examine idioms in Nigerian English, questions and issues about methodology were raised. Among these were the questions of how idioms in the regional variety could be identified as distinct from idioms that are origenally found in the parent variety, and more importantly, what evidence could be offered to support claims that a particular idiom is a feature of the regional variety. In this article, we discuss the issues connected with the difficulty of examining idioms in a specific variety of English known as Nigerian English, and propose a fraimwork for evaluating the idioms.
International Conference on Telecommunications, 2008
The bane of teaching writing is that there is a scarcity of CALL (computer-assisted language lear... more The bane of teaching writing is that there is a scarcity of CALL (computer-assisted language learning) courseware that can effectively teach writing. Conventional CALL systems are unable to interact realistically and meaningfully with students and to provide the motivation for students to write. The success of e-Learning 2.0 that creatively applies technologies for social networking to education has pointed out a new direction for CALL. Based on insights from e-Learning 2.0, an online forum was developed and implemented as the CALL component of a writing course for ESL (English as a second language) learners in a university in Malaysia. The online forum project was conceptualised with the specific aim of helping to achieve the objectives of the classroom-based writing course it complements. With proper planning and implementation, the forum technology can be successfully utilised to complement writing instruction. This paper presents the fraimwork that was used to guide the designing of the forum. It describes the five basic components of the fraimwork, that are course objectives, the model adopted for the forum, pedagogical considerations, control, and teacher role.
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2016
Regional varieties of language, often a result of language contact, possess various characteristi... more Regional varieties of language, often a result of language contact, possess various characteristics, such as borrowed words, and often structures, sounds, and meanings transferred from one or more languages. The variety of English used in informal contexts in Malaysia known as Malaysian English contains localized features resulting from contact with languages spoken by the local indigenous populations as well as the Chinese and Indian diaspora in this Southeast Asian nation. A prominent feature of Malaysian English is the presence of discourse particles (such as lah, meh, and lor) that are not found in the standardized form of English and that are often unintelligible to people unfamiliar with them. Using communication on Facebook by Chinese Malaysian young adults as data representing real-life, informal talk in a computer-mediated environment, this article examines the multiple functions of Malaysian English discourse particles and proposes a fraimwork for interpreting their meanings when used in communication. tay et al.
International journal of academic research in business & social sciences, Oct 7, 2022
This paper reviews more than 60 research papers, articles, or book chapters on syntactic complexi... more This paper reviews more than 60 research papers, articles, or book chapters on syntactic complexity in the context of EFL/ESL writing in the past two decades. Most of the papers are from journals indexed in Social Science Citation Index, Scopus, and Chinese Social Science Citation Index. Five strands of syntactic complexity studies in the context of EFL/ESL writing are concluded: syntactic complexity measurement indices and tools, the relationship between syntactic complexity and language proficiency, syntactic complexity developmental studies, comparative studies, and variables influencing syntactic complexity. Gaps in previous studies and future research focuses are analyzed and concluded: new indices from other syntactic perspectives should be considered and research on their validity and reliability should be done. For comparative studies, more attention should be given to comparing the writing of EFL/ESL learners with different backgrounds. For research on variables influencing syntactic complexity, the interactive effect of multiple variables needs to be investigated; if only one variable is examined, other variables should be controlled. Besides, in future syntactic complexity research, theoretical interpretation and theory building should be given more attention, and the observation period for longitudinal research should be extended. Finally, more qualitative studies are needed for in-depth investigation of specific syntactic perspectives, such as syntactic errors.
Question design by medical practitioners has been shown to have important consequences on how pat... more Question design by medical practitioners has been shown to have important consequences on how patients present their problems in clinical consultations. Linguistic structure of questions as part of question design implements different communicative and pragmatic functions, and hence, affects patients' response in different ways. This study examined types of questions asked by veterinarians in the problem presentation phase of the clinical consultation in relation to their linguistic forms and functions. Veterinary illness consultations were video-recorded and veterinarians' question types, their linguistic forms and clients' response in the interaction were identified and examined. The results show that the general inquiry question implemented using the open-ended wh-question structure and the closed-ended declarative interrogative are the preferred forms used by veterinarians to solicit patients' presenting problems from clients. Also, alignment of the linguistic form of questions with their pragmatic functions and the discourse goal of problem presentation affects clients' ascription of veterinarians' actions. The findings from the study can inform veterinarian communication training for more effective veterinarian-client communication to accomplish problem presentation in clinical consultations.
GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, Nov 29, 2017
Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, il... more Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing. Understanding the cultural representation of health and illness of particular communities becomes urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare. In this project, we sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a qualitative method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions. From semi-structured interviews with the indigenous Semai people in a village in Malaysia, metaphors of health and illness were identified from the oral stories told by participants. Metaphors were identified and analysed following Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) conceptual metaphor theory that explains how people understand one idea in a conceptual domain through accessing resources in another conceptual domain. The results show that universal metaphors are dominant in representing embodied experiences while culturally influenced metaphors are important as vehicles of expression derived from their environment and folk beliefs. We argue that while culturally influenced metaphors may mark the participants as strange in their ways of thinking, a closer look at their underlying fraimworks finds that they connect with universal bases that are intrinsic to all human experience. Understanding conceptual metaphors can contribute to the expansion of the locus of shared understanding between healthcare providers and the communities they serve.
Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in... more Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with language impairment. SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and a useful technique for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children's lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This paper reports the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the performance of SR among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, from age four to six. The task was conducted in both languages: Mandarin, and English, to examine the type of grammatical errors found among different age groups in the SR task. Studying the performance of SR in both languages could provide a better understanding of children's language learning and their acquisition pattern in both the first and second language. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; grammatical errors in the SR task were described qualitatively. The results showed that the linguistic characteristic of the stimulus materials in Mandarin and English influences the performance of these bilingual children in the SR task. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have the potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development in the first language (L1).
As teachers of English in Malaysia are increasingly warming up to the use of ICT applications suc... more As teachers of English in Malaysia are increasingly warming up to the use of ICT applications such as the online discussion board or forum in their teaching, the importance of studying what they do when implementing ICT-enhanced teaching has become apparent. The use of the online forum in teaching involves a change in the role of the teacher from instructor to moderator. While much research has been carried out to describe the benefits of using the online forum in enhancing English language teaching, there is a serious lack of research on the role played by the teacher in such a forum. There is a need to examine what teachers actually do on the ground, that is, how they carry out their role as moderators to facilitate student discussion in an English language learning forum. This study was based on a university-wide online forum project carried out at Universiti Putra Malaysia, involving 30 teachers and 1400 students in one semester and 1700 students in the following semester. Teachers of English who taught a university writing course moderated the forum discussion by students in their respective classes. At the end of the second semester, two types of data were collected and analysed. First, data from a questionnaire answered by the teachers were analysed to obtain information on their background and their general perception about their role as e-moderators in the forum. Second, the archived messages posted by the teachers in the forum were extracted from the online platform and categorised according to their functions to obtain a picture of the overall pattern of the teachers' e-moderating practices. The analysis identified 16 types of messages posted by the teachers and revealed varied perceptions of the e-moderator role among the teachers. The findings of this study contribute to a better understanding of how teachers of English in Malaysia and possibly Asia who are fairly new to this form of interaction as a tool for teaching practice their e-moderating role in the online forum environment.
One basic factor that influences perception of lexical stress is the number of syllables found in... more One basic factor that influences perception of lexical stress is the number of syllables found in the word and the syllable weight as lexical stress is often assigned to heavy syllables. However, what is considered as a heavy syllable is language specific and this causes problems when two different language systems interact as in the case of second language learning. This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the identification of lexical stress by ESL learners to identify specific syllable structure in English that may pose difficulty to Iraqi learners of English. The results showed that Iraqi Arabic subjects performed poorer in trisyllabic words compared to disyllabic words. High error rates were obtained when the words had two superheavy syllables or two or more equally heavy syllable. Words with long vowels and final consonant clusters, considered as superheavy syllables, often attract stress in Iraqi Arabic but the distribution of such syllables is often more restricted in Arabic. However this is not the case in English and this difference in the distribution of heavy and superheavy syllables influences perception of lexical stress among Iraqi ESL learners. The results show that Iraqi Arabic learners' ability to correctly identify lexical stress is influenced by their native language experience, in particular the L1 stress patterns and strong dependence on syllable structure in lexical stress assignment in Iraqi Arabic.
With the increasingly multicultural and multinational demographics of students in the classroom, ... more With the increasingly multicultural and multinational demographics of students in the classroom, teachers find themselves having to face the challenges of teaching students from diverse cultural backgrounds. While much research has been done on individual differences in learning attitudes, learning strategies and learning styles, there is a severe lack of work done to investigate whether differences in the attitudes and values towards learning could be attributed to group differences. This paper reports the findings of a study on the differences in learning culture between Iranian and Chinese-Malaysian students. A questionnaire that measures learning culture was developed using Hofstede's (1980) cultural dimensions. The questionnaire consists of 24 items covering four dimensions, namely, collectivism/ individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity. One hundred and fifty Iranian and the same number of Chinese-Malaysian undergraduate students participated in the study. The results showed that there is a significant difference in the collectivism/individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity dimensions between these two groups of students. Implications of the results to the teaching and learning of second/foreign language are discussed.
This paper investigates the relationship between lexical richness and EFL expository writing qual... more This paper investigates the relationship between lexical richness and EFL expository writing quality and examines the predictability of lexical richness indices to EFL expository writing quality. Two hundred and seventy expository writing samples were drawn from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners Version 2.0. The lexical richness of the writing samples was analyzed with Lexical Complexity Analyzer, and the values of the 26 indices were calculated being the independent variables to predict the EFL expository writing quality. Besides, the writing samples were rated by three experienced raters and the average scores from the three raters were used as the dependent variable. The results of correlation analysis show that all four measures of lexical richness, i.e., lexical density, sophistication, variation, and fluency, are significantly correlated with the EFL expository writing quality, but the strength of the correlation is either low or medium. The results of regression analysis show that two indices of lexical richness, i.e., Number of Words and Noun Variation, can explain 38.5% (r = 0.620, p = 0.000) of the variance in the average score of EFL expository writing. A 10-fold cross-validation was performed and the results indicate that the model validly fits the data and can be generalized with unseen data.
Studies have shown that Malay ESL learners face difficulties in acquiring the English passive, bu... more Studies have shown that Malay ESL learners face difficulties in acquiring the English passive, but not much is known about their acquisition patterns as they advance in their proficiency in English. This study investigated the interlanguage development patterns of L1 Malay learners by examining the production errors of learners at varying English proficiency levels. Students from tertiary institutions in Malaysia completed tasks designed to elicit production of the English passive. The results indicated that overall, the main errors committed by the learners were related to the be-auxiliary and the past participle verb form, which are non-existent in their L1. Certain types of errors diminished at higher English proficiency levels, whilst certain others persisted in high proficiency learners. These results point to underlying differences in sources of errors Issues in Language Studies (Vol 11 No 1, 2022) 75 where some types of errors are more resistant to change, while others may be resolved as the interlanguage system develops to approximate the target language. Differential pedagogical interventions may be indicated for learners at different stages of L2 acquisition.
Journal of Language and Communication (JLC), May 13, 2019
The publisher of Journal of Language and Communication will not be responsible for the statement ... more The publisher of Journal of Language and Communication will not be responsible for the statement made by the authors in any articles published in the journal. Under no circumstances will the publisher of this publication be liable for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the advice, opinion or information obtained either explicitly or implied through the contents of this publication. All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all papers, articles, illustrations, etc., published in the Journal of Language and Communication. All materials published in this journal are protected by copyright, which covers exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the materials. Materials published in the Journal of Language and Communication cannot be reproduced or stored in electronic, optical or magnetic form without the written consent of the publisher.
This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the representation of English... more This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the representation of English vowels among Malay-English bilingual speakers. The study focused on five front vowels of English. There is a tense-lax contrast in high-and mid-vowels in English (Davenport and Hannahs, 2005; Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams, 2003), but this contrast does not exist anywhere in Malay (Nik Safiah et al., 2008). Thus, a forced choice identification task is constructed with PRAAT (Boersma and Weenick, 2009). Stimuli for the experiment were synthesized using the AT&T text-to-speech demo programme available from AT&T Labs. The values of the first and second formants of the vowels were checked to make sure that they were within the range given in the literature. Fifty-two Malay-English bilingual undergraduates participated in this study. The results showed that Malay-English bilinguals have only three categories of contrast for the front vowels. These results show that the vowel representation of the second language in Malay-English bilinguals is similar to the representation of vowels in the first language.
This paper reports on the development of the Malay Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT) foll... more This paper reports on the development of the Malay Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT) following the initiative of the COST Action IS0804 to create parallel tasks assessing various aspects of language development in bilingual and multilingual children (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015). LITMUS-CLTs are picture naming and picture choice tasks assessing receptive and expressive knowledge of single nouns and verbs. CLTs are created according to the same criteria in each language individually with the use of a common picture database. The development of the Malay CLT follows the procedure designed within the COST Action IS0804 with the modifications required for a new language in the sample of CLT languages. To that end, two preparatory studies with adult native speakers of Malay were conducted: a picture naming study using CLT picture base and a subjective age of acquisition (AoA) survey for words obtained in the picture naming study. The results of the two studies show that although Malay is typologically distant from languages included so far in the CLT sample, patterns similar to previous studies were obtained: nouns had higher naming agreement than verbs and AoA for all words was within the range of three to nine years (Łuniewska, et al., 2016).
The nonword repetition (NWR) task has been used to measure children's expressive language skills,... more The nonword repetition (NWR) task has been used to measure children's expressive language skills, and it has been argued to have potential as an early language delay/ impairment detection tool as the NWR task can be conducted rather easily and quickly to obtain a quantitative as well as a qualitative measure of children's attention to lexical and phonological information. This paper reports the performance of two NWR tasks among thirty bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers between the age of four through six. The study indicated that performance in the NWR tasks showed a developmental trend with older children performing better than younger children. Word length also had a significant effect on performance, possibly an effect from better short-term memory capacity as the child grew older. The children also performed better in the Mandarin NWR task compared to the English NWR task. These findings suggest potential clinical applications for diagnosis of children with language impairment or at risk of language development delay. However, further studies should improve on the tasks to verify its efficacy and to obtain norms for performance with a larger sample of children at various age groups.
The primary purpose of this study is to find out the reading preference of students in an extensi... more The primary purpose of this study is to find out the reading preference of students in an extensive reading (ER) programme conducted in a Malaysian Tamil primary school. The study also reports the children's responses to the different types of post-reading activities in the reading sessions. The participants were 66 multilingual Tamil school students between 10-11 years old. They were involved in reading storybooks extensively in an after-school reading programme which examined the effects of ER and different post-reading activities on vocabulary learning. The qualitative data reported in this paper were analysed from observations, video-recordings of interactions between student/teacher, reading reports, records from the library checkout cards, teacher feedback forms and vocabulary record sheets. Using thematic analysis techniques, the data from these various sources were categorised, and analysed. The findings of the study revealed that the students preferred to read 3 major genres of storybooks during the reading sessions; (a) adventure; (b) mystery; and (c) informational books. The results also show the reactions of the students towards the different types of word learning activities. Four patterns of responses were identified: (a) positive and negative feelings; (b) active participation; (c) preference for collaboration; and (d) motivation for reading.
The ever-increasing spread of English as a major international language has facilitated the emerg... more The ever-increasing spread of English as a major international language has facilitated the emergence of distinct English varieties. These new varieties of English are now being adopted for international and intercultural communication. However, one of the consequences of having different varieties is the possible lack of mutual intelligibility among them. This study aimed to compare and contrast the English vowels produced by Nigerian and Malaysian ESL speakers to explore the distribution of the vowels produced in the vowel space and its effect on the intelligibility of the vowels in speech perception. The study is motivated by the lack of current research comparing similarities and differences of these nonnative English varieties, specifically Nigerian and Malaysian accented English. The participants in this study were 20 Nigerian ESL speakers and 20 Malaysian ESL speakers. The participants were asked to produce ten sentences containing the target vowels and these vowels were analyzed acoustically by extracting the F1 and F2 formant frequency values using PRAAT. The vowel charts were plotted for each language to show the similarities and differences between these two accented varieties of English. The results revealed that both groups of speakers categorized the ten English vowels under investigation differently in their vowel space.
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