This paper reports on the effects of movies on the acquisition of English language among students at a tertiary institution in Malaysia. In this study, "out-of-class" activities are leisure activities that students do outside classroom setting and watching movie is one example. The study aims to examine the effects of movies on the students' Affective Filter (i.e. motivation, anxiety, and self-confidence). The Affective Filter is a mental block that prevents language learners from being receptive towards comprehensible language input, thereby disrupting their acquisition process. In order for smoother acquisition to occur, the block needs to be lowered and one of the ways in achieving this is through out-of-class activities. The study also aims to examine the influence of movies on the students' English acquisition process. The participants of this study were low-achieving students. Data were collected through Facebook group discussions, participants' reflective notes and focus group interviews in this qualitative research. The findings of this study reveal that students' Affective Filter level is slightly lowered which allowed them to acquire new language skills namely vocabulary and pronunciation knowledge. From the findings, English teachers should consider utilizing movies as a learning tool. Students should consider searching for opportunities to learn outside classroom.

This research investigated into the lexical density and frequencies of five types of lexical chunks located in 300 online business letters. Top 10 websites on business correspondence had been identified in terms of traffic visitors and bounce rate under one million web rankings worldwide. Criterion Sampling method was identified prior to extracting the sample letters from the websites. The data was then run with Antconc Concordance Program (ACP) for lexical density and frequency analysis. Top 15 lexical chunks in online business letters (OBL) were compared against those top 15 in Business Letter Corpus (BLC). Findings revealed that there was a total of 39 916-word tokens and 939 counts of lexical chunks found in this corpus. It was found that more lexical words do not imply more lexical chunks used in based on types of business letters.  All 5 types of lexical chunks were identified and ranked in descending order; Sentence Builders (SB) as the most frequent type, followed by Collocations (COL), Deictic locutions (DLs), Polywords (POLs) and Institutionalized Expressions (IUs) as the least frequent type of lexical chunk. Sub-divisional analysis indicated that Grammatical Collocations (GCs) were more common than Lexical Collocations (LCs). Majority of lexical chunks were formed more at sentence level than phrasal level. Comparative analysis between top 15 lexical chunks in OBL and BLC discovered that most top lexical chunks in online business letters are representative of those corporate business letters in BLC. Pedagogical implications in terms of the reliability of online business letters for academic reference and future research considerations are also addressed.

The study sought to examine authorial emotiveness and passive tone of academic writing in academic research abstracts (RAs) to appeal to the Aristotelian pathos. Based on the integrated framework of Contrastive Rhetoric and Domain of Emotional Tone, this study investigated the overall demonstration of emotional appeal through quantitative content analysis of two rhetorical items - emotive phrases and passive voice in subtly ‘colouring’ the academic tone of research abstracts. Four hundred eighty (480) research abstracts (RAs) of the international non-native English writers (INE) and Malaysian non-native English writers (MNNE) were sampled from 88 national and international indexed journals. Two quantitative analysis tools were used to auto-generate the frequency percentages, which were then analysed with SPSS. It was found that MNNE RAs showed a significantly denser level of overall emotional appeal than INE RAs. The authorial tones of emotiveness and passiveness were also distinctly heavier in academic MNNE RAs than INE RAs. These were concluded as the marked rhetorical features of non-native English writers, deflecting them from the ones used by native English writers. In terms of research implication, the common trend of these features was not to be misconstrued by MNNE writers as the main rhetorical appeal of research composition.

This paper sought to explore the Aristotelian appeal of emotions (Pathos) based on the writers' emotive discursivity of writing through their rhetorical use of move structures in organising the content of their research abstract. It is referred to as the TPS move structure which represents the Territory (T), Problem (P), and Solution (S) moves. A total of 480 academic research abstracts (ARAs) of indexed journals from the outer circle of Malaysian Non-native English writers (MNNEWs) and the inner circle of Native English writers (MNNEWs). An NVivo12 software application was used in this study to analyse the frequency of the writers' different types of TPS move structures. It was found that both groups would prefer the non-linear TPS type (non-TPS) of move structures by organising their research ideas through PTS or TPTS structures. These non-TPS structures were discursive, non-linear, and repetitive which reflect the oriental way of writing in trying to appeal to the readers' emotional minds. Despite all writers' less usage of TPS structure in showing their linearity and directness, further analysis showed the Malaysian English writers would be more linear and direct than the native English writers. In doing so, Malaysian English writers would be more likely to omit the move related to the problem statement, demonstrating their less emphasis on the research gap. Further research could be conducted to explore the reasons for the writers' lack of Anglo-European direct writing style in academic research abstracts.

This study explores the use of code-switching and code-mixing in the practice of writing the grounds of judgement in the Malaysian Judicial System. As these grounds of judgement are official documents published for the public interest, a lack of lexical accuracies for the important terms and phrases may lead to poor linguistic representation of the legal text. Thus, thirty-two samples of grounds of judgement written in the national language from 2015 to 2021 were extracted from The Current Law Journal and analysed according to Appel and Muysken and Malik’s theories on code-switching and code-mixing in terms of the frequency used in the legal text. Findings revealed extensive use of intra-over inter-sentential code-switching in the form of insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalisation of code-mixing. These were driven by the absence of specific legal terms in the national language, the lack of registral competence among the writers as well as the functions of the legal terms to serve the pragmatic contexts of the text, emphasise a point or highlight the semantic significance of the terms, and reflect the identity of the writers. The present study shows limited linguistic corpus on legal terms in the national language; therefore, language experts should intensify their efforts to expand the corpus and increase awareness of the terms through language courses for legal practitioners.