Writing is perceived to be one of the most difficult skills for English language learners to master. Although studies on challenges faced by ESL students in writing are replete, most of them have focused on students at secondary and tertiary levels of education. Studies on learners at lower level have been scarce. Thus, this paper aims to fill the gap by examining the major problems faced by ESL primary school level students in writing in English. Survey and interview sessions were conducted to fit the purpose of the study. Data were collected from a class of 26 students from Year/Standard 6 of the primary school level in Malaysia and an interview session with the English teacher of that particular class. The findings indicate that the major difficulties charted are rooted in the students’ poor mastery in vocabulary, inability to spell words correctly and L1 interference. Thus, in order to enhance the students’ skills in writing in English, the teacher implemented some remedial measures during the teaching and learning sessions. The findings have essential pedagogical implications on understanding students’ struggle to write in English at the lower level of education.

Online learning poses challenges that students might never have encountered in a face-to-face learning environment. In learning English, students may confront more challenges as they need both cognitive and metacognitive skills in dealing with the dynamic lessons involving interaction, online exercises, and audio, video and text downloads. The challenges faced in online learning have led students to employ learning strategies to help them learn more efficiently and effectively. This paper examined students’ strategy use in learning English online and the correlation of the strategies with their academic performance in the subject. Using the Online Language Learning Strategy Questionnaire (OLLSQ) to gauge students’ strategy use in the domains of cognitive, metacognitive, resource-management and affective, the findings indicated that all students were high users of OLLS in English online learning with the highest preference for metacognitive as the strategies were helpful to students in planning and organizing their studies. However, there was low correlation between the strategies use and performance. Overall, the strategies have impacted the students positively and helped them to cope with the new learning mode that is different from the traditional learning. It is hoped that the discovery of the strategies could provide some important insights into how students can be more successful in learning online, and help others to achieve their study goals and overcome any challenges confronting them in learning English online.   Keywords: E-learners, Learning strategies, Online learning, Performance

Pragmatic competence is a core part of communicative competence and has become the main focus of teaching and learning process in today’s English language teaching. Thus, it is pivotal to have more of pragmatic materials in English textbooks since they are the major references used in the classroom. This study examined the conversation section in the series of Indonesian ELT textbooks to see whether the pragmatic content as required in the curriculum is fulfilled. Using Searle’s speech acts model as the framework, content analysis method was applied by using descriptive approach in analysing the illocutionary acts and forces provided in the textbooks. The findings indicate that despite their occurrences on the textbooks, some of the speech acts provided were low in frequency and lacked variety to develop better pragmatic competence for the students. This has significant implications on the textbook writers in developing content materials for the pragmatic competence.

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Blogs have gained popularity among language teachers as a tool to develop students' writing skills. However, using blogs in teaching writing has not been widely practised in Indonesia depite the positive effects on students' learning as reported in the literature. This paper examines the development of students' communicative writing skills through blogging. The data were collected from students' writing based on different themes posted in a class blog over a five-week period. Using Franker's ELT blog rubric as a framework for analysis, the findings were classified into four codes of communicative skills in writing: creativity, critical thinking, voice and comment. The findings indicate a general improvement on the students' communicative skills in writing based on these codes. Students also responded positively towards the use of blogging in developing their communicative skills in writing. Not only blogging helped to develop their minds critically and evaluatively, they were able to write their thoughts and respond to others' point of view freely without the presence of the instructor and fellow friends. Such findings indicate that with advance of technology in education, blogs can be an alternative medium for teaching writing in class, especially in this IR4.0 era.

Thinking skills plays an important role in tertiary education. In the 21st century, students are required to master these skills so that they can deal with the various situations that they come across in the university and later at the workplace. This paper analyses students report writing based on a given set of data written in exam conditions to investigate their reasoning skills especially analyses and synthesis which are the 2 highest levels in the Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive domain. A total of 30 humanities and 30 science students' reports were analysed using the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) marking scheme. The preliminary findings indicate that good writers managed to demonstrate analysing and synthesising in their writing while the weak ones failed to integrate both the skills to a certain extent. On one hand, the middle-graded writers could only manage to show one of the skills. The science students managed to incorporate both skills at a better level as compared to the humanities students as they are more exposed to logical thinking in their major courses. For pedagogical intervention, it is suggested that HOT writing lessons must facilitate students' writing ability and interest and should be clearly instilled in the teaching and learning of writing activities in ESL writing classrooms. Students also need to be taught explicitly how to use the HOTS (higher-order thinking skills) not only in the language course but in all other courses in the university.

The study attempts to map the linguistic landscape of Sentul, the new urban area of Kuala Lumpur. It aims to examine the preferred language of shop signs in the area. Data were collected primarily from visible shop signs and categorized through a sign coding scheme based on Sunwani’s (2005) model. The analysis indicates that the area preferred a mixture of English, BM, and Chinese for the shop signs. The findings show diverse factors govern the choice of language use on the shop signs attributed to identity, nature of business owners, and shop location.   Keywords: Linguistic Landscape; Shop sign; Multilingual; Language Learning.    eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.   DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v5iSI2.2333

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