This study attempts to examine the use of English modals in terms of their frequency and functions. For this purpose, Form 4 and College students' argumentative compositions were extracted from the Malaysian Corpus of Students' Argumentative Writing (MCSAW). In order to analyze the data, this study employed discourse analysis and some descriptive…

This paper discusses findings from a study investigating feedback efficacy on the accurate use of prepositions by ESL learners in written work over a period of 12 weeks. The study involved two treatment groups and a control group comparing the differential effects of the focused indirect with the unfocused indirect corrective feedback on the…

Little research in the ESL context has examined the online teaching and learning activities in high schools. One main reason is the lack of appropriate theoretical framework rather than the learners or the environment. Using data from twelve high school students and two teachers from two Malaysian schools, the current study adapted Borup et al.'s…

Learning to write in a composition culinary course is very challenging for L2 learners. The main barrier in writing proficiency within this discipline is the lack of vocabulary, specifically the lack of exposure towards specialized vocabulary. This study aims to provide a corpus of specialized vocabulary within a food writing course. By providing…

Studies on ESL/EFL learners' use of the progressives reveal that it is one of the grammatical aspects most problematic to them. This paper presents the results of a study on the use of progressives among Year 5, Form 1 and Form 4 Malaysian ESL learners' compositions using the English of Malaysian School Students (EMAS) corpus. The purpose of this…

In today's world, there are lots of methods in language teaching in general and teaching writing in particular. Using two different tools in writing essays and conducting a study to compare the effectiveness of these two tools namely blog and pen-and-paper was the basis of this study. This study used a quantitative true experimental design aimed…

Conventional corrective feedback has been widely practiced but has been said to be tedious, stressful and time consuming. As such, the focus of this study is to investigate the use of an alternative method to giving corrective feedback namely, an online corrective feedback through e-mail. In order to examine if this innovative form of corrective…

This study was conducted to identify and describe the written verb-form errors found in the EAP writing of 39 second year learners pursuing a three-year Diploma Programme from a public university in Malaysia. Data for this study, which were collected from a written 350-word discursive essay, were analyzed to determine the types and frequency of…

Previous studies (Wu 2007; Hyland 2004; Hyland & Tse 2004; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995; Crismore et al. 1993; Vande Kopple 1985) have established the use of Metadiscourse (MD) as an essential element in writing as it allows the writer to create a dialogic space with his readers. In recent years, attempts have been made to analyse MD…

Citation is one of the most prominent features of academic writing through which academic writers both exhibit the breadth of their scholarship in a specific research area and subtly demonstrate their memberships of the disciplinary community. Citations are important rhetorical devices that allow seasoned writers to promote their current research…

This study presents the main findings from a study which investigated Malaysian multilingual students' practical use of three languages with respect to reading, speaking and writing in Bahasa Malaysia (BM), English and German. In addition, two further aspects have been examined: students' motivation to learn a language, and the respondents'…

Among a number of urban adolescents in Malaysia, going online is a much valued practice. They are regularly drawn to the Internet to engage in activities across school, nonschool, mainstream and alternative domains. The aim of this study is to know more about what these adolescents do online. Data on the online activities were collected from 535…

This case study analyses two written texts produced by an ESL learner either side of a five-week genre-based teaching intervention. The second text was judged to be of a much higher quality by two independent markers in a previous study. The question arising is: what exactly has improved? The analytical tools of systemic functional linguistics are…

This article presents the findings of a corpus based research that investigated Malaysian ESL learners' use of modals in two written tasks. The aim of the study was to investigate the distribution and functions of modals used in the students' writing. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis supplemented…

Presented is a brief survey of the Structural Approach as it has been introduced in the teaching of English in the non-English-medium primary and secondary schools in Malaysia and a discussion of some of the obvious problems in the implementation of the program. The author assesses the standard of written work produced by students on the various…