A good grasp of vocabulary enables language learners to articulate, comprehend and communicate ideas and concepts effectively. For learners whose first language is not English, mastering vocabulary knowledge in terms of the breadth and depth is challenging and needs to start at a young age through the use of various strategies. The lack of English language vocabulary knowledge would demotivate learners and even result in abandoning efforts to learn the language. Therefore, it is important that learners know and are able to use five strategies, which include determination, social, cognitive, memory, and metacognitive strategies to learn vocabulary. Determination and social strategies are in the discovery category, while social cognitive, memory, and metacognitive strategies are in the consolidation category. This study aims to determine the vocabulary learning strategies used by 132 Year Five primary school English language students in two urban National Type Chinese schools in Sarawak. It investigated the strategies these learners used, how frequently they used them, and their reasons for preferring particular strategies. Data were collected from two classrooms at each school through the use of questionnaire and individual interview. Questionnaire results were analysed descriptively in terms of mean scores and standard deviation while interview responses were coded, categorised and analysed using thematic analysis. The findings suggest that while the students employed moderate use of all the five strategies, cognitive strategies which involved mechanical approaches were the most used while social strategies were not used by all students.
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 main goal of modern second language (L2) pedagogy is to engender appropriate communication skills among its learners. Hence, willingness to communicate (WTC) in L2 emerged as an important variable in recent years. Several factors have been found to influence students’ L2 WTC directly or indirectly. For this purpose, many scales and questionnaires have been developed so far to examine the factors influencing WTC among L2 students. However, a comprehensive questionnaire on WTC inside ESL classroom is still lacking. Likewise, WTC in relation to language use and motivational orientations in a single study has yet to be investigated. Thus, this study was aimed to develop and validate questionnaires on WTC, language use and motivational orientations. For this purpose, a five-phase model was used. After an extensive literature review, questionnaires on WTC, language use and motivational orientations were framed. Operational definitions of the three constructs were established and the items of the questionnaires were finalised. Two experts in the field of applied linguistics determined the content validity of the questionnaires. At the end, the questionnaires were piloted on 50 undergraduates and 10 ESL teachers. The results revealed that all the instruments were valid and highly reliable.
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