Heng swee Chan

Universiti Putra Malaysia | UPM · Department of English

A state of multilingualism allows people to grow up with access to two or more languages which results in exercising choice of languages for different purposes in different domains. Even within a single domain, education for example, the choice of language varies according to contexts, topics and participants. Since Malaysia is a multilingual count...

span lang="EN-GB">Criticisms on multiple choice questions (MCQs) include the possibility of students answering MCQs correctly by guessing, and MCQs generally are said to fall short in cultivating independent learning skills, such as taking charge of their learning goals. Countering these common concerns, this research used online MCQ exercises with...

Aligned with the industry demands to equip tertiary students with essential communication skills, courses like Public Speaking have been introduced in universities to develop and strengthen students’ practical communication skills. This course can be tailored for various domains such as academic, personal and public communication. In current litera...

This study intends to investigate the realizations and functions of grammatical subject in the method section of research articles across disciplines from hard and soft sciences. To this end, 20 method sections of research articles from two disciplines, namely Psychology and Chemistry, were selected and analyzed. The data were selected from high im...

The fast-paced, technologically advanced modern world has embraced English as the current ‘lingua franca’ of tertiary education, international commerce, tourism and diplomacy. International business, collaboration and global exchange seem to depend on effective communication in English. Malaysia is currently experiencing an emerging trend to focus...

Frequencies and discourse functions of grammatical subject types were investigated in a corpus of forty results and discussion sections selected from four disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering). The results and discussion sections were selected from research articles that were published in 2008-2012...

This study investigates the use of oral communication strategy instruction on English as a Second Language (ESL) learners’ oral communicative performance and their strategic competence. The treatment involved 12 weeks of training using oral communication strategies such as circumlocution, appeal for help, clarification request, fillers, comprehensi...

This paper reports a corpus-based genre analysis of the use of linguistic features in the introduction section of Hospitality and Management research articles (HM RAs). It explores t he frequently used linguistic features such as modal verbs, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, tenses, conjuncts, hedging, citations- integral and non-integral...

Being a specific communicative genre of disseminating knowledge in today’s academic arena, the research article abstract has its own specific conventional structure. Through such a seminal genre, research article writers are able to ratify and contribute their own new findings to the research community they belong to. Taking a cross-disciplinary q...

Understanding ethnic identity has gained increasing theoretical, empirical, and practical salience in Malaysia due to developments in economics, national desires and social structure of society. Social psychologists’ interest in identity is centred on feelings of belonging to a group and the consequences of identification with one’s social groups i...

This research analyzes the discourse functions of grammatical subjects used in results and discussion sections of research articles across four disciplines. To this end, sixteen results and discussion sections from four disciplines, namely, English Language Teaching, Economics, Biology and Civil Engineering (four from each discipline), were analyze...

Group discussion forms an integral language experience for most language learners, providing them with an opportunity to express themselves in a naturalistic setting. Multi-word expressions are commonly used and one of them is lexical bundles. Lexical bundles are types of extended collocations that occur more commonly than we expect; they are consi...

For years, word sequences which tend to co-occur have been studied under different terms, such as phraseology, chunks, n-grams and lexical bundles. Lexical bundles in the main are referred to as extended collocations which are used more frequently that we expect by chance. They are building blocks of discourse which have three main functions. Among...

Referred to as extended collocations, lexical bundles are considered as a main factor in building fluency in academic discourse; helping to shape meaning and coherence in a text or speech. For decades, lexical bundles have attracted considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). While, the focus of...

English for Science and Technology (EST) was introduced in 2003 as an elective school subject for the learning of scientific content in English, indicative of Malaysia’s realization of the export value of English for international commerce. EST lays the foundation for the use of English in the fields of science and technology as a preparatory cours...

Language learning may be affected by a language instructor’s accent. Many studies have been carried out to investigate whether accent has an influence on learners’ perceptions toward their instructors or whether accent can affect employability. This overview links studies on accents through an empirical literature review on native and non-native ac...

A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying inte...

A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying inte...

A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying inte...

The present study investigated the effect of role-play on improving pre-intermediate Iranian EFL learners" retention and recall of idiomatic expressions. Idiomatic expressions are important in language competence especially when there is a desire for EFL learners to be more native-like in the use of the language. Learning methods are always a conce...

Learning and teaching a foreign language in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) is a relatively new experience. Relating to this experience is the concern for assessment which has two primary purposes, they are, to demonstrate to others that students are performing as expected and secondly to monitor student’s progress in order to plan appropriate acti...

This study, as a concise and critical literature review, examines related studies that investigated the interplay of the three constructs: ethnic identity, national identity and language policy. To do this, five related research articles were located and their similarities and differences in terms of their findings and methodologies were compared a...

Bahasa Malaysia (the Malay language) was chosen as the national language to unite the linguistically diverse groups in Malaysia in the mid-1950s. This choice brought about a total change in education policy, whereby Bahasa Malaysia became the medium of instruction for all subjects (other than English) in public schools. The decision saw a complete...

Preparing teachers to teach Mathematics and Science in English is a responsibility that cuts across many institutions and agencies. Universiti Putra Malaysia(UPM) is one such institution given the responsibility of equipping the Mathematics and Science Trainee Teachers (MSTTs) with the skills of using English to teach both subjects. The UPM teacher...

It is noted that second language (L2) learners of English in the Malaysian classroom have problems with the pronoun paradigm in English. For example, they do not make a gender distinction between the forms of he/she and him/her in English. This study aims to investigate this phenomenon of pronoun use and will attempt also to link their use to the i...

Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) in Malaysia - Where do we start? The CAI policy in Malaysia was formulated in 1989 which advocated students acquiring computer literacy through CAI in a curriculum across the curriculum approach. Since then, a number of projects/prog rammes have been implemented. For example, the ComIL system (the computer integr...

Affect in writing is linked to knowledge bases, attitudes, apprehension, strategy use, and self-efficacy which together shape a writer's behaviour. These elements of affect have been recognized as essential ingredients in the development of effective writing. Hence, understanding the workings of affect within a writing discourse model contributes t...