The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the problem-based learning approach (PBL) on students in language classes in two areas: course content and language development. The study was conducted on 128 students, grouped into the experimental and control groups, and employed an experimental research design. The syllabus, textbook, and instructor were controlled for both groups. The findings of the study showed that in terms of course content, both groups improved but in terms of language the PBL group showed more improvements. The PBL group showed improvements in the post-writing test, that is, their essays were richer in terms of support and arguments for each point, while the non-PBL did not show much difference in their post-writing test. This indicates that students could still acquire the course content with minimal content instruction. The limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are offered at the end of the paper.

Code-switching has always been an intriguing phenomenon to sociolinguists. While the general attitude to it seems negative, people seem to code-switch quite frequently. Teachers of English as a foreign language too frequently claim that they do not like to code-switch in the language classroom for various reasons-many are of the opinion that only the target language should be used in the classroom. This study looks at the teachers' attitudes towards code-switching in teaching English as a foreign language to Malay students at one of the local universities in Malaysia. Data was collected through observations, questionnaires and interviews. Each teacher was observed, their language use were recorded, transcribed and then analyzed using the functions proposed by Gumperz (1982). The results of the study showed that teachers do code-switch in the language classroom, despite their claim that they do not. Analysis of the data showed that, in most cases, code switching by teachers was done to serve pedagogical purposes.

This paper presents a study on the interactive roles of lexical knowledge and reading strategies on reading comprehension performance of ESL learners. It examines how the lexical knowledge or the reading strategies contribute to second language (L2) reading comprehension. It also investigates whether there is a relationship among the three main variables which are lexical knowledge, reading strategies and reading comprehension performance. The Survey of Reading Strategy (SORS), the Vocabulary Levels Test, a writing test and a reading comprehension test were administered to 70 students from the Public Administration Course through convenience sampling method. Descriptive statistics was used to describe the participants’ performance on the three tests and their reading strategies used as well as to assess the relationship between the three main variables of this study. On the whole, the participants reported using most of the reading strategies with high and moderate frequencies. Apart from that, it is found that, the students’ word mastery level is only 2,000 word families, which is far below the minimum level required for tertiary education. There is no correlation found between the reading strategies used and the reading comprehension achievement of the participants. On the other hand, a statistically significant relationship (r= .739, p<0.01) was found between the participants vocabulary size and reading comprehension performance. The findings of this study help both language teachers and students to acknowledge the roles of lexical knowledge and reading strategies in improving the L2 reading comprehension performance. Keywords: Global strategies, lexical knowledge, problem-solving strategies, reading strategies, support strategies. Cite as: Zuriyani, M. Y. & Mohamed Ismail, A. S. (2019). The interactive roles of lexical knowledge and reading strategies on reading comprehension performance. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 4(1), 273-299. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol4iss1pp273-299

Studies on strategy research have shown the usefulness and importance of language learning strategies (LLS) for ESL and EFL learners. However, research on content-based learners in relation to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) has yet to be undertaken. This study, therefore, investigated the learning strategies of students at a public English medium university in Malaysia. The study was mainly motivated by concerns about the standards of English of graduates of Malaysian universities. These concerns have also been expressed by the university authorities. The purpose of the research was to investigate the patterns of LLS as reported by the students according to gender, courses, and undergraduate programmes. A total of 312 students from three degree programmes participated in this study. Their learning strategies were investigated based on the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1990). The findings of the study indicated that the students from the different degree programmes differed in the use of LLS. However, there was no statistically significant relationship between LLS and gender.

It is believed that students from different societies and cultural background have their own preferred rhetorical style of interaction. In writing, such distinctive preference is usually exhibited through the use of linguistic features, of which metadiscourse (MD) markers are considered as one of the signposts to the interpretation of writing style preferences. This study aims to investigate the use of interactional metadiscourse (MD) features and its relevance to the rhetorical style preferences in academic writing of Thai and Malaysian master’s students. Using Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy, their thesis discussions were manually analysed in terms of interactional MD markers to determine their frequency of occurrence and to relate the results to the rhetorical styles of writing preferred by each group of students. The analysis revealed that of all five types of interactional MD features, hedges were the most frequently used device followed respectively by boosters, attitude markers, engagement marker and self-mention. In terms of the rhetorical style of writing, the frequency of MD features suggests that tentative and indirect statements, reader-responsibility, distant-relationship between writer and readers, and less writer-involvement in the texts were the preferred rhetorical styles of interaction of both Thai and Malaysian students. The writing conventions and rhetorical styles of the students can be explained from a sociocultural point of view that they are relevant to the oriental style of interaction from which both groups of students originated. The study draws attention to the pedagogical implications that students in Thai and Malaysia should be given more instructional focus on how to utilize MD features in making academic writing more persuasive and interactive.