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Publications
Publications (31)
Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is specific to the language itself, or that extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structure...
Background
Teachers are important resource personnel in a low-middle income country. Understanding teachers’ knowledge on ASD is critical as teachers act as the knowledge broadcasters and the agents of social change and development in a community.
Objective
This study sought to conduct a grassroots investigation of ASD knowledge and stigma among p...
Lay abstract:
In this study, we explored whether pictorial narration could offer a solution to teacher training on effective inclusion of students with autism spectrum disorder in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. For this purpose, pre- and post-training knowledge data were collected from 87 Laotian teachers who participated in teacher trainin...
This paper reports the English reading proficiency of a sample of engineering undergraduates in a public university of Malaysia. A standardized online reading comprehension assessment, called Reading Evaluation and Decoding System (READS) was administered with 189 first year engineering students during their enrolment into six different engineering...
Despite many nations having policies that mandate inclusive education for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the levels of implementation vary. In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of the grassroots’ interpretation of inclusive education for students with ASD in order to identify local contextual barriers and enablers o...
As there is still debate on whether Ehri’s phase theory of word development is relevant to more transparent orthographies, this investigation explores the alphabetic connections in the memory of early readers of Malay. A comparison design was applied with extreme groups as an independent variable. The extreme groups comprise of a sample of 32 high-...
Shared reading is a common instructional activity in preschools. However, not all preschool teachers receive training in shared reading. This research investigated factors that influenced the attitudes, perceptions, and practices of shared reading among an urban sample of preschool teachers in Malaysia. The findings revealed that prior training exp...
Given the long establishment of English as an international lingua franca, the motivation of English learning among the English as foreign language (EFL) learners is still a challenging issue faced by EFL teachers in some contexts. In this study, a survey was conducted with 158 EFL learners in a university in the southern Lao PDR to explore factors...
Foreign language anxiety is common among adult learners, especially those who lack exposure to the language that they are learning. In this study, we compared the foreign language anxiety experienced by monolingual and bilingual tertiary students in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) who were learning English as a Foreign Language. The...
In this study, the pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards the educational inclusion for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were investigated to identify their attitudinal patterns and predictors. An attitudinal survey was conducted with 264 pre-service teachers in a teacher training programme in Malaysia. The study involved 151 special e...
Many developing countries still face a scarcity of resources and expertise to provide quality education to school-age students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Despite efforts to promote inclusive education for these students, progress is slow due to the lack of multidisciplinary supporting services such as speech and language therapy. In this...
Anxiety is a common situation-specific attitudinal response experienced by many English as Second Language (ESL) speakers when they are required to communicate in English inside or outside the classrooms. Globally, many teachers who are ESL speakers often experience English language anxiety when they have to use English as the language of instructi...
Code-switching is common in certain English as Second Language (ESL) classrooms in Malaysia. In this study, a survey method was used to account for the impacts of macro-level socio-environmental factors such as school type, school size and class size on ESL teachers' attitudes towards classroom code-switching. The results showed that in general, te...
Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the perception, awareness, societal attitude, and knowledge about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Malaysian medical students.
Methods: An exploratory survey was conducted with 83 medical students in Malaysia. In the survey, the medical students were required to rate their perception, awareness, societal...
International Journal of Research in Social Science, June 2016, 6 (6). The interplay between teachers' professional identities and their contextual factors in Malaysia and Bangladesh were compared in the study. The study employed the use of a qualitative approach through structured interviews and discussion with novice teachers in the two regions i...
Globally, journal publication index is used as a key indicator to measure university performance. At the macro level, it contributes to the university ranking. At the micro level, it reflects academicians' scholarship values and credentials. Over the last decade, tertiary education has rapidly grown in the Asia Pacific region. Tertiary institutions...
Doctor of Education (EdD) is a doctoral level program which is becoming popular in modern times. Additional to the PhD program, professional doctoral program is the highest academic degree program offered in universities. However, many people are not aware of the differences between EdD and PhD programs. The lack of understanding leads to misinterp...
Fluency is one of the five components of reading competency alongside with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. It is related to reading comprehension and it can be used to predict the reading competency of a reader. However, research on such relationship is limited in ESL context. Hence, the purpose of this study was to deter...
Pre-service special educators' Malay word structure knowledge was assessed through their analysis of words. A total of 69 participants analysed a vocabulary list based on a set of criteria formulated from the Malay language word structure. Results indicated that they were able to count syllables and phonemes, and identify types of affixations; howe...
This article traces the evolution of special education in Malaysia across four chronological stages: before and during the early colonial period (before 1900), pre-independence (1900–1957), post-independence (1957–1990) and modern Malaysia (1990 to the present), through document analysis. By placing current issues and trends within a historical per...
The prevalence of autism is increasing globally. While most of the published works are done in the Western and European countries, the trend in autism research is shifting towards the Asian continent recently. In this review, we aimed to highlight the current prevalence, diagnosis, treatment and research on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in Singap...
The Online Malay Language Corpus-based Lexical Database for Primary Schools discussed in this paper is a long-term research project by the School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Based on a corpus of Malay language textbooks used in primary schools, the project aims to develop a lexical database of Malay words commonly encountered...
The inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream regular schools has been seen as the best practice in special education provision, most markedly since the 90s. International research has provided amassing evidence towards the advantages of inclusive model over a segregation model of special education provision. However, nearly two decade...
Abstract Malay is described as an alphabetic language with salient syllabic structures. In our
attempt to develop a reading intervention program for early Malay struggling readers, word
analysis of Malay children's stories was conducted. Additionally, in order to have a better
understanding of Malay word structures, a cross-linguistic comparison...
Scholarly output, particularly in the form of journal publication is a key indicator in various levels of university performance. It contributes to university ranking, faculty ranking and academicians scholarship credentials. Therefore, scholarly output has become a standard measure used to determine intake, promotion and tenure renewal of academic...
Many novice researchers are encouraged to write and publish for the benefit of their careers. However, not many researchers have successfully published in the top-tier journals. Previous research on the writing outputs of researchers provided evidence that the organization of writing is among the major weaknesses which hinders this group of researc...
Dyslexia remediation in Malay is still in its infancy stage of development. In this case study, a pilot treatment decoding program in Malay was developed and trialed with a child with dyslexia. The treatment program made use of the widely researched English reading remedial principles as a starting point for a remediation. The results indicated tha...
Cross-linguistic studies showed that young readers are sensitive to the orthographic and phonological structures of the languages in use. In our attempt to develop a Malay reading remedial programme, we conducted a word count analysis on Year 1 and Year 2 Malay textbooks. The results provided empirical evidence to describe the orthographic and phon...
Background: Globally, there is an increased prevalence of preschool and school-age children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Current reports show that about one in every 110 children fall within this category of disorders. Consequently, the successful inclusion of these children in both regular and special education classes is becoming a c...
This paper reports the findings of a survey of 100 mothers of Chinese children aged between 6 and 36 months from middle to upper-middle socio-economic backgrounds in Penang, Malaysia. The findings include the language backgrounds of these mothers, their contextual uses of multiple languages and their language choices with their children. Through th...