Some studies have reported the positive outcome of using concordancers and dictionaries in (ESL) context. This study aims to examine how an EFL writer consulted with concordancers and dictionaries along with Google and Google Scholar when engaging in academic writing at university level. The researcher investigated a non-English-major postgraduate student corpus consultation over five months. The researcher provided a toolkit including corpus tools; concordancers, collocation dictionaries, thesaurus, Google, in combination with traditional reference resources such as monolingual and bilingual online dictionaries. The participant received a three-session training to consult with different resources while writing research paper. Real-time data, stimulated recall interview, participants' writing and query logs served as the main sources of data. Results showed that the participant was aware of the applicability of each corpus tool. He could successfully solve 604 linguistic problems, and promoted his linguistic awareness. It is implied that corpus tools have the potential to assist EFL writers in proofreading and editing the surface levels of their writing.
Standardized testing is viewed as particularly incompatible to the process of learning due to its summative nature as it measures what students are able to recall and produce. Because of the discrepancy between the process of learning and products of learning, educators today have come to recognize that an alternative form of assessment is required to complement the existing form of assessment. This study intends to determine the techniques ESL teachers use in implementing portfolio as an assessment tool. The techniques ESL teachers employed while implementing the assessment process in the classroom enabled the researchers to propose a model for portfolio assessment. Currently, ESL teachers in Malaysia do not have a specific model or technique to conduct the portfolio assessment process because portfolio is heard of but not widely used. Therefore, this study was carried to scrutinize procedures ESL teachers use as a guide in instructional planning and student evaluation based on their teaching in the L2 classroom. The participants were nine ESL secondary school teachers in Malaysia. Semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and teachers' individual portfolios were utilized to explore the techniques which served as a guideline for ESL teachers employed for the teaching and learning in the classroom. Findings indicate that the portfolio assessment model developed has provided ESL teachers the opportunity to document individual student's growth. Furthermore, the teachers divulged that teaching is sustained when teaching materials, teaching techniques and assessment techniques were upgraded to help students in achieving the learning outcomes. The results of the study have implications for assessment, teaching and learning of English as a second language.
Academic writing skills are essential tools that postgraduate students reading for their doctoral degree have to master to be able to produce dissertations, research reports and academic assignments of quality in the course of their studies; and publish research-based articles in established journals. This paper discusses the perceptions of a group of Iranian postgraduate students pursuing their doctoral degrees at UPM (Universiti Putra Malaysia) on the challenges they face in writing academically. They provided the data for this paper via their responses to a survey. The findings indicate that these postgraduate students perceived some academic writing skills to be more challenging than the others. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of the findings; and recommendations on how the situation can be improved.
Plagiarism is the euphemism for 'academic theft', 'academic dishonesty' and 'academic misconduct in academia'; and is the taboo word among academics in academia. This paper discusses the issue of plagiarism in terms of what constitutes plagiarism, who are normally 'the practitioners' of plagiarism, be it unintentionally or otherwise, factors contributing to the practise of plagiarism, effects and implications of plagiarism on the 'practitioners', and offers suggestions on how to reduce (if not eliminate) any involvement in plagiarism. Knowledge and awareness about plagiarism would help academics and aspiring scholars to steer away from this act, as plagiarism would have dire and long term repercussions on their career, reputation and those who come to be associated with them.
The purpose of this study was to discover the relative effectiveness of different types of reading strategies on measures of reading comprehension performance for students with different learning styles. Students were separated into four learning style groups (active, sensitive, visual and sequential) based on their scores on the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) questionnaire. The results indicated that students with varying learning styles responded differently to the reading strategies tested in the study. Active learners performed better than other groups when using the keyword and question and answer strategy but performed significantly worse than other groups with the rereading strategy. Sensitive and sequential learners on the other hand performed better than other groups with the rereading strategy. Visual learners did well with the keyword strategy.Of the strategies tested, only the keyword strategy showed consistently positive results for all learning style groups. Each group scored higher on the keyword condition than on the control condition. Hence use of the keyword strategy is highly recommended in classroom environments and incorporating the keywords into texts to make texts easier to understand is a viable method for improving comprehension. The question and answer strategy should be used with caution as it results in sub-par comprehension for learning styles other than the active learning style. Similarly the rereading strategy which works well for sensitive and sequential learners should also be used only for these learners as it confuses active learners. In a nutshell, a student's learning preference will influence the way information is processed and thus selecting and using appropriate reading strategies is essential to ensure the best possible results.
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