Employability of graduates is a concern in many countries, including Malaysia, and the high unemployment rate among graduates is often attributed to their lack of English proficiency and communication skills. These two distinctive elements are often collated, and it is important to find out which is more important to employers. The study examined the employers' views on the importance of English proficiency and communication skill for graduates to be employed in the Malaysian private sector. The data were from semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 employers in the private sector who were in the position to recruit staff. The 21,433-word interview transcripts were analyzed. The results revealed that employers in the Malaysian private sector view language proficiency and communication skills as separate qualities. The employers are willing to consider employing candidates with average English proficiency if they have good communication skills, except for jobs which require more communication in English such as customer service and marketing. The results also revealed that good communication skills can increase employability and opportunities for career advancement. The findings highlight the communication skills that universities need to emphasize so that their graduates have the necessary skills to perform well in employment interviews and in their work.
Accepted as an integral part of education, technology in teaching and learning can enhance practice not only in the traditional class but also beyond it. Schooling can now be extended to learning beyond the four enclosed walls of the classroom into the almost limitless possibility of education across time and space accessible via the domain of cyber technology. The significant contribution of technology to education has prompted educational bodies like the Malaysian Ministry of Education to prominently point out that online learning becomes the main pedagogical approach in higher learning institutions in the nation’s educational blueprint. The powerful potential of technology however, can only be realised through informed and purposeful use of it by teachers. Integrating technology in the language classroom requires that teachers not only have knowledge about the Technology but interplay between three components of knowledge – Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) which determines the essential qualities of teacher knowledge that are required when teachers employ technology in their teaching. The main study is therefore designed to measure teachers’ readiness to use technology in teaching English language in tertiary level classrooms to enhance student learning. To serve this purpose, a pilot study was carried out on 20 English language instructors to evaluate the reliability and the validity of a questionnaire that was adapted to gauge instructors’ readiness in carrying out technology-mediated classrooms at a public university in Malaysia. Correlations among items in the current study reveals lower coefficients compared to a previous study on the same instrument probably due to the smaller sample size in the current study but the correlationships are mostly positive which still suggests convergence validity. The internal consistency of the items was mostly better than two previous similar studies. Five items that seemed to be misbehaving in their respective measures were chosen based on their inter-item correlation and the item-total statistics and scrutinized via cognitive interviews with selected respondents to gain insights into the items but the results of the interviews revealed that the items are functioning as intended.
The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship among three spelling scoring metrics, namely, words spelled correctly (WSC), correct letter sequences (CLS), and phonological coding (PC) in Malay language. The relationship between spelling measure and word reading measure was studied. There were 866 Primary 1 (Grade 1 equivalent) students from 11 randomly selected public primary schools in Kuching, Sarawak Malaysia who participated in this study. The study showed that the scores from each scoring metric were highly correlated to each other. There was a strong relationship between each spelling outcome to word reading.
Reading is an important skill that needs to be developed from young among children. In supporting them to read, they will first need to learn to decode which involves understanding the alphabetic principle of the written word which is that letters characterise sounds or phonemes. Developing phonemic awareness requires explicit teaching that is systematic and thus, teachers play an important role. This study thus, uncovers the knowledge of phonemic awareness of rural primary school teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) and their related instructional practices. Data were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire which was completed by five ESL teachers from a rural primary school in Sarawak. The findings revealed that the teachers had limited knowledge of phonemic awareness. Although two of them reported focussing their instructional approaches to develop their students' phonemic awareness, their self-assessment of this knowledge was low. This limited knowledge would not only affect the design of their instructional practices but also impede the reading success of young ESL learners. Contribution/ Originality: This study contributes to the existing literature on the role of teachers and their knowledge of phonemic awareness to support the development of ESL reading among young learners. 1. INTRODUCTION The concerted view in the literature related to reading is that it concerns comprehending text (Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, & Hulme, 2010; Gaskins, 2011; Hjetland et al., 2019) which involves understanding or making meaning from the text. However, to be able to understand a text, a reader needs to first decode (Castles, Rastle, &
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