DR. SARIMAH SHAMSUDIN

Teaching a language is a complicated process which requires considering and applying a method while performing it and is conducted through a method in a language class. A teaching methodology refers to the way or method in which a teacher teaches the learners. The methodology used by the teacher will determine the kinds of work and activities the students will do in class and how well or how poorly the student or learner will be able to learn and use the language. Thus it is imperative that the method or approach used in the classroom meet the needs of the learners. This paper aims to discuss the communicative language teaching method and its application in the EFL context.

More and more Malaysian upper secondary school students are doing well in their studies and entering colleges and universities for matriculation and diploma programmes immediately after school. Besides English for General Purposes (EGP), secondary school students should also be familiarized with the 570 academic words (in the Academic Word List) that may appear frequently in academic texts. At tertiary learning institutions, academic words are essential because students have to read more specialised and complex academic texts. This research was carried out to investigate whether the Malaysian secondary school English language syllabuses cater to the academic vocabulary needs of students who enter tertiary institutions. To investigate this, the researcher put all the 1,316 words listed in the word lists (for the lower and upper secondary school syllabuses found at the end of the syllabuses’ booklets) into Range (Nation, 2005), a tool which separates words into General Service Word List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL). The results reveal that of the 1,316 words, only seven belong to AWL while the majority are GSL words. Although there are statements made in the syllabuses indicating that they also cater to the students’ needs for their further education, the target words specified in the word lists suggest that they are meant mainly for EGP. The students’ academic vocabulary need has apparently been neglected.

This paper will describe an ESP approach to the design and implementation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tasks for computer science students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and discuss the effectiveness of the chat feature of Windows NetMeeting as a tool for developing specified language skills. CMC tasks were set within a programme of sustained-content language instruction (SCLI), a variation on the content-based instruction approach. Various studies have confirmed the potential of SCLI as a means of familiarising language learners with academic genres and the language skills expected of them in the content classroom. To date, however, there has been little or no research into the use of CMC within SCLI. We found that students who followed a programme of SCLI using CMC ESP tasks made significant improvements in their oral communication skills, and also achieved higher scores than their peers in a computer science project undertaken in the semester following the treatment.

The purpose of this research was to investigate whether synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) would be an effective tool to meet the English for specific purposes (ESP) needs of language learners. A single tertiary education institution in Malaysia was used as the context of the ...

A Curriculum Development Decision Support System (CurDevDSS) through Online Analytical Processing Tool. S. Sahibuddin, A. Bakri, M. Bahari, NH Zakaria, S. Shamsudin ξ ... Data warehouse allows this process by the relational database conceptual design called star schema. ...