Zuraidah Mohd Don

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Technology Malaysia

The use of English as a medium of instruction in the teaching of science and mathematics in the Dual Language Programme (DLP) in Malaysia is to increase students’ exposure to English in developing English proficiency to meet globalisation needs. One of the main issues in the implementation of DLP is student readiness to learn science in English. Th...

Plain language summary Effects of Simple and Complex Tasks on Chinese Students’ English Language Production when conducted using Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication Platform The purpose of this study is to find out the effects that simple and complex tasks have on Chinese students’ English language production when conducted using synchronou...

The titles of translated books have a significant impact on their marketability, as they are among the first features perceived by potential readers. This study focuses on the strategic differences in the translation of book titles for children and adults, an under-researched area in translation studies. To this end, 100 English book titles for chi...

This paper makes a positive response to the CEFR Companion, which requires learners to speak the target language with appropriate prosodic features defined as stress, rhythm and intonation. When, as in Malaysia, the teaching of English is aligned with the CEFR, teachers are expected to teach prosody to enable their students to progress, despite the...

This paper examines gender representation in two textbook series: Solutions, published by an international publisher, and the Iran Language Institute (ILI) series, written by local writers. Evidence of gender representation is drawn from the analysis of their religious content in the narrative texts and the illustrations. The analysis of gender rep...

The rise of social media in Malaysia has transformed communication, yet it has also ushered in cyberbullying. This study explores cyberbullying experiences among Malaysian young adults, focusing on their engagement, language use, and coping mechanisms. Data from 148 university students reveal that cyberbullying is prevalent on platforms like Facebo...

Today’s linguists are increasingly concerned with high-level properties of texts, and tend to work top-down in some branch of discourse analysis, while corpus linguists are concerned with low-level properties such as grammatical class, syntactic constructions and different kinds of text annotation, and tend to work bottom-up. This paper seeks to cl...

Forest management practices have been addressed widely in the forestry discipline but are rarely considered from a linguistic perspective. Linguistic exploration of the construction of meaning in forest discourses helps provide greater detail on how forest resources are governed through the forest management practices carried out by forestry profes...

There is a rich research literature on phonics and related topics such as phonemic awareness and measurements of the benefits of phonics for later success in reading. What seems to be missing is a theoretically sound account of phonics itself as a discipline. This paper traces the way the present situation came about, and restores phonics to its tr...

This paper is intended for researchers involved in or contemplating research in corpus linguistics, and is concerned in particular with the language of corpus linguistics. It introduces and explains technical terms in the context in which they are normally used. Technical terms lead on to the concepts to which they refer, and the concepts are relat...

The declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages raised the question how it will be possible in practice for hitherto uninvestigated languages to be investigated at all. The suggestion put forward in this article is that traditional language description reimagined in the context of the Digital Humanities has the capacity to...

This study draws on Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory to examine the use of metaphors in business-related political speeches by Mahathir Mohamad in 2000, a year which marked a turning point for Malaysia as it recovered from the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1999. We adopt Charteris-Black's three-step procedure for metaphor analysis,...

Myanmar refugee communities living in Malaysia have produced a whole generation of stateless children born and brought up in the country. In this chapter we explore the lived experiences of two second-generation Myanmar refugee youths— Prince, a Rohingya boy, and John, a Bamar boy—through their narratives on belonging and identity. Selected excerpt...

Digital tools designed for linguistic analysis offer new ways of approaching old tasks, and they now routinely enable tasks which were formerly impossible. The work for this paper is based on MaLex, which is a collection of data tables and procedures designed to represent the intuitive knowledge of speakers of Malay, and provides the infrastructure...

We adopt Spencer-Oatey’s approach to examine face concerns relating to self-presentation and identity attributes. Selected extracts from political interviews involving Western interviewers and Iranian interviewees were analysed to examine how participants constructed and negotiated their personal, collective and relational selves as they unfolded i...

The chapter details out the six engagement sites that can be incorporated in the teaching and learning of English outside the classroom

Group oral testing has attracted increasing interests in performance-based assessment, mainly due to its ability to measure interactional competence. Increasing attention has consequently been paid to the performance of raters, whose orientations have an impact on the scores in view of their role as mediators between performances and scores. Studie...

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has made a significant impact on language testing worldwide, particularly on the English language proficiency test (EPT). Language testing bodies in many countries including the United States, Canada and Australia have begun aligning their language assessments with the CEFR. Although i...

This article analyses research in speech emotion recognition (“SER”) from 2006 to 2017 in order to identify the current focus of research, and areas in which research is lacking. The objective is to examine what is being done in this field of research. Searching on selected keywords, we extracted and analysed 260 articles from well-known online dat...

Patient decision aids (PDAs) are increasingly used to support treatment decision making in type 2 diabetes. However, research on PDAs generally involves quantitative analysis or focuses on physicians’ communicative practices, with limited data on how PDAs are used collaboratively in doctor-patient consultations. We apply discourse analytic methods...

Objective To investigate whether the use of apatient decision aid (PDA) for insulin initiation fulfils its purpose of facilitating patient-centred decision-making through identifying how doctors and patients interact when using the PDA during primary care consultations. Design Conversation analysis of seven single cases of audio-recorded/video-rec...

This article describes the steps and phases involved in constructing a questionnaire on the motivation to learn a second or foreign language (or L2 motivation). It evaluates psychometric properties of the instrument by performing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Participants in this study were 194 students. The results of the explorato...

This article examines prosody in interaction in the context of a 66 minute meeting to agree on assessment marks as part of a pilot project studying assessment procedures. The data is drawn from a larger set of data of approximately 10 hours of academic meetings. The three participants are female colleagues involved in English Language teaching. The...

In order to address the problems of graduate employability in Malaysia, the Malaysian Government produced in 2012, the National Graduate Employability Blueprint 2012–2017. In addition to setting out in detail the government’s philosophy and vision, the blueprint identifies key players who are expected to play crucial roles in making Malaysian gradu...

This study analyses image and text to investigate the way slimming advertising exploits women’s fear of being overweight to the extent that they feel obliged to do something about their own bodies. We show how Malaysian slimming advertisements construct certain types of female body which reinforce cultural stereotypes, namely the overweight body th...

University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even though these ratings receive mixed reviews, there is little conclusive evidence on the role of the intervening variable of teacher and student gender in these ratings. Possib...

According to Howard Gardner, human intellectual ability cannot be measured by a unitary concept of general intelligence, and the performance of cognitive tasks draws on different types of intelligence, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, natural, and existential. Despite t...

This paper investigates the interaction of gender, disability and education in rural Iran, which is a relatively unexplored field of research. The responses of 10 female students with disabilities from Isfahan indicated that the obstacles they faced included marginalization, difficulties in getting from home to school, difficulties within the schoo...

This study considers the effect of relevant background knowledge (schema) on reading comprehension in a group of Iranian medical students. The participants were selected using random sampling from two different groups: thirty students enrolled in an MA course in TEFL, and thirty medical students in years 4 to 7 of a seven year medical course. The s...

Numerous studies have explored images and representations about Russia. For the most part these studies were done in Western socio-cultural and educational contexts. The present article focuses on images about Russia held by learners of Russian in a big public university in Malaysia. Besides exploring the content of the students’ stereotypical repr...

This study explores stereotypes about Germany, its culture and native speakers held by learners of the German language in a big research university in Malaysia. It adopts a rigorous approach to exploring the students’ mental representations about the target language country. Thus, it investigates not only the content of stereotypical representation...

Systematic research on English language teachers' perceptions of research has not yet shown whether or not 'teacher research' is acceptably understood and carried out in institutions of higher education worldwide. Moreover, understanding cross-cultural (mis)conceptions of and barriers to research is an important initial step in promoting teacher re...

This study investigates a syntactic problem in the writing of ESL learners whose first language is Bahasa Melayu or Malay. It focuses specifically on is, are, was, and were overgenerated with inflected and uninflected lexical verbs to form two primary constructions, namely be + V and be + Ved (or Ven in the case of strong verbs). This study aims to...

Language learners bring into the classroom a multitude of stereotypes about the target language country, culture and native speakers. Recognizing an important role that these images play in the process of learning a foreign language, several research studies have explored stereotypes held by language learners. For the most part, these studies were...

Stereotypical representations of Italy have been widely explored from European and North American perspectives. However, few studies have been done in an Asian context. This study addresses this gap and investigates stereotypical images about Italy held by students learning Italian in a renowned public university in Malaysia. The findings revealed...

This study focuses on stereotypes about Germany, its culture and people, held by learners of German in a big public university in Malaysia. It examines not only the stereotypical representations of the target language country but also assesses its favourability and salience, which has not been done previously. The findings revealed that the student...

The present study aims to explore mental images or stereotypes about Italy held by the students learning Italian in a big public university in Malaysia. It not only examines the stereotype content but also assesses favourability and salience of the students’ images about the target language country. Thirty-four beginner language learners participat...

Abstract SAGE Open July-September 2014: 1–8 © The Author(s) 2014 DOI: 10.1177/2158244014550611 sgo.sagepub.com Second language acquisition cannot take place without having exposure to language input. With regard to this, the present research aimed at providing empirical evidence about the low and the upper-intermediate language learners’ pr...

This article examines the way the voices of political elites are incorporated in news reporting to represent refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia as illegals, threats and victims, which reflect their ideological positioning. We also examine voices that foreground their plight and appeal for the relaxation of rules. Selected extracts are analysed...

This study explores images about Brazil held by learners of Brazilian Portuguese in a big public university in Malaysia. It employs a mixed methods approach for this purpose. In the qualitative component of the study, the students’ images about Brazil were explored by analyzing their responses to an open-ended question and grouping the resultant im...

The development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for a new language requires resources like speech database and segment-phonetic labels. As an under-resourced language, Malay lacks the necessary resources for the development of such a system, especially segment-phonetic labels. This research aims at developing an HMM-based speech synthesis s...

"In this paper, we examine the way a leading Malaysian newspaper represents the act of charitable giving on the part of big corporate organisations that take on the role of benefactor in order to fulfil their corporate social responsibilities. Drawing on the methodology of critical discourse analysis, we examine extracts from four newspaper reports...

Intelligence is a trait that is commonly believed to be important to effective leadership. This study was conducted to identify multiple intelligence abilities and their relationships with personal factors of a group of Malaysian school leaders (n=287). It also examined the predictors of overall multiple intelligence. A psychological test - the Mul...

This paper is concerned with the Malaysian language policy in the context of education. The Malaysian government has not only to balance the need for Malay as the national language with English as the global language, but also to cater for the language needs of different immigrant communities. The situation is far from static, and the role of Engli...

The development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for a new language requires resources like speech database and segment-phonetic labels. As an under-resourced language, Malay lacks the necessary resources for the development of such a system, especially segment-phonetic labels. This research aims at developing an HMM-based speech synthesis s...

BLURB: This volume provides a fascinating glimpse into the complex language ecologies of Southeast Asia. Adopting a relational perspective, it considers their significance for the region, its peoples, the policy and practice of language teaching, learning and assessment and the fate of local languages. It gives particular prominence to the relation...

Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The...

Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The...

In a Hidden Markov Model-based speech synthesis system, an arbitrary text input has to be converted to context-dependent labels before it can be synthesized. This research proposes the development of a context-dependent label generating module for Malay, an under-resourced language with no available system to generate context-dependent labels. We h...

The originality is that the man has to renew his idea by the ideas of others. The simulation does not mean a pure imitation, but it is intended to be the real digester of influence. There is nothing to be claimed in highlighting the originality and individual personality, except that the man fed the views of others, as “the loin is not except some...

Arundale’s Face Constituting Theory is used to examine the way face is conjointly co-constituted in criticism–criticism response exchanges in PhD vivas in Iran. This approach carried out in CA tradition on institutional talk makes it possible to explain how face is achieved in the manner grounded in the interactants’ perspective. The analysis conce...

This study examines the interplay of politics, religion and discourse in the representation of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in government-controlled news websites in Iran. It is grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Van Leeuwen’s social actor network model (2008) is used as the theoretical framework to analyse the lingu...

This paper investigates the prosodic strategies used by Malaysian speakers of English to mark the information status of new and given discourse elements. Thirty speakers of Malaysian English were recorded both when playing a game designed by Swerts, Krahmer, and Avesani (2002) to elicit semi-spontaneous speech and when reading out a 179-word story....

This paper investigates the prosodic strategies used by Malaysian speakers of English to mark the information status of new and given discourse elements. Thirty speakers of Malaysian English were recorded both when playing a game designed by Swerts, Krahmer, and Avesani (2002) to elicit semi-spontaneous speech and when reading out a 179-word story....

Discourse and Crisis: Critical perspectives brings together an exciting collection of studies into crisis as text and context, as unfolding process and unresolved problem. Crisis is viewed as a complex phenomenon that – in its prevalence, disruptiveness and (appearance of) inevitability – is both socially produced and discursively constituted. The...

Like several other Asian countries, Malaysia uses English for a variety of official, professional and everyday purposes. Many Malaysians use English alongside their first language, typically Malay, Chinese or Tamil, but have a particular need for English if they are to succeed in their careers. What is special about this book is that it looks under...

This article examines ways in which participants achieve face in Iranian dissertation defences, while doing interactional work in their roles as candidate, examiner or supervisor. Following Arundale, we adopt the notion of face as an interactional and relational phenomenon which is conjointly co-constituted by participants as they conjointly co-con...

This research reports the development and evaluation of Malay emotional voice corpora through listening evaluation, and how the numbers of emotion choices offered to evaluators affect the result of the evaluation. The voice corpora comprises of three emotions, namely anger, sadness and happiness being expressed by two male and two female actors. Th...

This study investigates the implementation of educational research among urban secondary schools in Malaysia. The respondents include school teachers and administrators, lecturers in education institutions, and committee members of the state education departments. Data collected from interviews were coded and analyzed using open, axial and selec...

This research reports the development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for Malay, which is an under-resourced language with few resources including recorded speech and segmental labels. We propose the cross-lingual use of resources for developing a Malay HMM-based speech synthesis system. We used the Festival English speech synthesis system...

This paper concerns the incorporation of naturalness into Malay Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems through the addition of a culturally-localized affective component. Previous studies on emotion theories were examined to draw up assumptions about emotions. These studies also include the findings from observations by anthropologists and researchers on cul...

This book provides a detailed overview of functional and pragmatic approaches to the study of language in use. Edited by three scholars in the field, it comprises chapters written by academics from the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, who have been teaching these courses at the Masters level. The book is therefore useful...

This research reports the development and evaluation of Malay emotional voice corpora through listening evaluation, and how the numbers of emotion choices offered to evaluators affect the result of the evaluation. The voice corpora comprises of three emotions, namely anger, sadness and happiness being expressed by two male and two female actors. Th...

This paper discusses an emotional prosody generator for a Malay speech synthesis system that can re-synthesize the selected vocal emotion from neutral synthesized speech output and improve the naturalness by adopting rule-based prosody conversion techniques. The role of prosodic features in emotional expression, particularly fundamental frequency a...

This paper makes an instrumental analysis of English vowel monophthongs produced by 47 female Malaysian speakers. The focus is on the distribution of Malaysian English vowels in the vowel space, and the extent to which there is phonetic contrast between traditionally paired vowels. The results indicate that, like neighbouring varieties of English,...

The construction industry in Malaysia is a competitive high-risk business as the nation strives to emerge as a developed country. The number of construction companies in the country has been sky-rocketing in recent years, including the setting up of many small companies in rural areas. These small companies often face enough problems attaining a go...

In this article we make use of the methodology of corpus linguistics to organize and search the several millions of words contained in the published speeches of Tun Dr. Mahathir as prime minister. Our corpus consists of over 2.5 million words of speeches, roughly half in English and half in Malay, with over 900 English speeches and over 800 Malay s...

Since the year 2005, Malaysia has been moving away from constructing new buildings in favour of refurbishing historic and old ones. This is due to a number of reasons, including the economic crisis, land limitation and sustainable issues. However, when a historic building is refurbished, there is seldom any methodical study made of the occupants' o...

This book serves as a tribute to how the problems of computer processing of the languages spoken in Asia were overcome and as an inspiration for speech technology development in the future. It's a one-of-a-kind reference resource for the entire speech community as Asia continues to play a much more active role in the global economy. Over 75 separat...

This research represents the first attempt to produce a working system for the automatic processing of texts of Bahasa Melayu 'Malay'. At the heart of the system is an integrated relational lexical database called MALEX, which draws on the experience of working on English and other languages, but which is specifically tailored to the conditions of...