This study investigates the use of DO, HAVE, MAKE, GIVE and TAKE in light verb constructions (LVCs) and their corresponding simplex verb forms in British L1 and Malaysian L2 students' writing. The students' essay sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) of Great Britain (ICE-GB) and Malaysia (ICE-Malaysia) formed the data of this…

Embracing gamification in education is, indeed, inevitable, especially with the arrival of the millennials whose lives are greatly influenced by digital technologies and favor learning in a fun, interactive, and engaging environment. Quizizz, a gamified educational tool, has gradually gained the interest of researchers and stakeholders in…

Stance in general and metadiscourse markers, in particular, have attracted the interest of several studies. Therefore, this study explores the use of metadiscourse in the second language (L2) academic writing by English as a foreign language (EFL) postgraduates in one of the Malaysian public universities. We analyzed the frequency and wordings of…

The purpose of this research was to identify the common errors made in English writing by Malaysian Chinese primary year 6 ESL students and to determine the extent of the influence of the first language, Mandarin in ESL writing. The Mandarin language uses a logographic writing system while the English language is written in alphabetic scripts. The…

Purpose: The inclusion of an increasing number of high-functioning ASD children in mainstream classrooms demands for adequate awareness of autism and effective teaching methods from teachers to ensure that learning takes places efficiently. Hence, this study investigated the atypical language performance of a high-functioning Malay girl with…

This study investigates the syntactic errors in speaking among an Arab L2 post-graduate student in an academic speaking context. Specifically, the objectives are to describe the syntax error patterns committed by the student while engaging in speaking and to explore the contributing factors that may affect the errors. To address these objectives,…

The teaching of English grammar to second language learners is usually a tedious, stressful and time consuming activity and even after all the effort, students have generally found these lessons boring and confusing. As such, innovative language instructors have been trying different approaches to the teaching of grammar in their classrooms. Using…

This research is a corpus-based study of secondary and college ESL Malaysian learner's written work by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Past Tense Auxiliary "Be". This research studied the past tense auxiliary "be", types of past tense auxiliary "be" errors and frequency of past tense auxiliary…

This research studied the use of modals in argumentative written tasks by Form 5 Malaysian secondary school ESL students. The aim of this study was to examine the use of English modals at the syntactic level from data presented in the MCSAW Corpus. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis aided by…

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…

It is often claimed that ELT textbook materials are mostly unwittingly intuitively- rather than empirically-based and that this bookish form of language is far from reflecting the real language use. The present study, by adopting a corpus-based approach, tends to shed light on the extent of agreement between the Malaysian ESL textbooks and the…

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…

The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials have been emphasized by many researchers owing to the fact that the studies of authentic texts have revealed some inconsistencies between the use of grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in language textbooks that are based purely on hunch. Therefore, by…

Using corpus approach, over the past two decades, a growing number of researchers started to blame textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in real language use and provided ample information about the mismatch between language used in textbooks and real language in use. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian…

An important aspect of native speakers' communicative competence is collocational competence which involves knowing which words usually come together and which do not. This paper investigates the possible relationship between knowledge of collocations and the use of verb noun collocation in writing stories because collocational knowledge…