I am an Associate Professor in Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). At present, I teach Research Methodology, Academic Writing, Discourse Analysis and Psycholinguistics to postgraduates and undergraduates. My areas of research interest are TESL, ESP, corpus linguistics, genre/discourse analysis, computer-assisted corpus analysis (CACA) approach which I developed during my PhD study, critical discourse analysis, conducting language needs analysis in professional organizations, analyzing learner and genre-specific corpora. I am holding the patent for the CACA approach. I am keen on developing professional and academic corpus for the purpose of research. At present, I am actively motivating scholars in conducting classroom-based investigations using the CACA approach to enhance classroom teaching and learning practices.
Jurnal Pengabdian dan Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Indonesia
El-Hasan Mosque is located in the denizen association Rukun Warga (RW) XII, Resonegaran habitatio... more El-Hasan Mosque is located in the denizen association Rukun Warga (RW) XII, Resonegaran habitation, Terban Village. Resonegaran is west of Purbonegaran Village, on the east side of Prof. Yohanes Street. Because of the mosque's renovation, The Quran education has temporarily stopped in the Quran education park located within the El-Hasan Mosque. Therefore, during the renovation’s vacuum period for Quran education, community service helped increase children's understanding of Islam and bring children closer to the Quran through recitation assistance, Iqro’ (reading), and memorizing the Juz’amma, short verses. The Qur'an Education Park activity program was implemented over the course of nine meetings with a total of twelve hours. The first six meetings were scheduled for six hours, one hour for each meeting, and the last three meetings for six hours, two hours for each meeting. The last three meetings were for memorization checks for the participants, which took longer time...
This study aims to investigate the frequency level of ‘nouns’ used in poems written by the underg... more This study aims to investigate the frequency level of ‘nouns’ used in poems written by the undergraduates of Universiti Teknologi MARA Kampus Machang based on Paul Nation’s headword list. The importance of knowing the frequency will determine teacher’s priority in teaching vocabulary. The effect of teacher’s implementation of standard nouns in classroom should reflect in the target behavior of the learner as they utilize the word in writing and mostly in communicating. The methodology used in this mini-scaled investigation of the written communication is the Computer-Assisted Corpus Analysis (CACA). Ten poems written by ten undergraduate students were collected and analysed by Tagger C5 tagset to identify the ‘nouns’ and separate it from other content words. Subsequently, ‘nouns’ frequencies were calculated by using AntConc software in order to determine the type of noun that most frequently occurred in the student’s writing. The list of 107 words was then compared to Paul Nation’s ...
The study explains the difficulties of writing faced by Bangladeshi higher secondary students and... more The study explains the difficulties of writing faced by Bangladeshi higher secondary students and gives the possible solution to overcome them. Several studies have been conducted to investigate the implementation of media like Facebook, YouTube, and mobile phone among Bangladeshi postgraduates and undergraduates’ students to improve their academic writing. However, few studies have focused on the writing challenges that Bangladeshi High school students faced in their writing by using newspaper. This study also attempts to investigate the impact of using newspaper to secondary school students to enhance their communicative competence in writing. In particular, this study employs the explanatory sequential mixed methods design as a means of researching the reciprocity between newspaper use and its effects on the writing skill. Data was collected by using pretest, posttest, and a semi-structure interview. Collected data was analysed quantitatively սѕіոg tհе Stаtіѕtіϲаӏ Pаϲkаgе fοr Sοϲ...
Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, May 31, 2022
The pandemic has intensified issues faced by the journalism community in Malaysia. This study is ... more The pandemic has intensified issues faced by the journalism community in Malaysia. This study is an attempt to help the media industries upskill themselves in terms of the written discourse. This study describes the rhetorical structures in Malaysian newspaper reports, namely The Star, in terms of the rhetorical moves and steps by using the genre theory, corpus-based discourse analysis and corpus analysis. MyCORONAS (Malaysian Corpus of Online Newspaper Articles) corpus of 90 selected news reports consisting of crime news (TSC), environmental news (TSE) and political news (TSP) was compiled and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively to identify the frequency, functions, and patterns of rhetorical moves. The findings identified a nine-move structure for the newspaper reports. The nine-move structure consists of five optional moves and four obligatory moves. Variations in the use of the steps were observed within the subgenres. Additionally, based on the functions of the moves, it was found that the newspaper report is a hybrid genre with various communicative functions. Based on the patterns of move distribution, the dispersion value shows that the moves are tightly clustered. To conclude, the findings of this study will heighten the awareness of ESP learners on the importance of using appropriate rhetorical moves to write a newspaper report which will help the journalism industries reform themselves during the pandemic.
International Journal of Language Education and Applied Linguistics
Understanding the differences in communication styles is becoming increasingly important in busin... more Understanding the differences in communication styles is becoming increasingly important in business communication as more companies expand their operations to include local and international operations. The purpose of this article is to compare the structural moves employed in the Singaporean and Malaysian promotional genres from the standpoint of moves analysis and comparison. Argument arises on the similarity and dissimilarity of business discourses involving the features of genres between these two neighbouring countries. As a result, a structural linguistics analysis was conducted in order to investigate the variations in communicative purposes as well as the lexical frequency of the sales emails that were written. The comparison between Singaporean sales promotional letter and Malaysian sales emails moves is based on Bhatia's (1993) Singaporean sales promotional letter moves. According to Bhatia's sales letter framework, there are seven moves, whereas in this study, se...
Koya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Semantically, intensifiers are concerned with the degree that scales the element to which the int... more Semantically, intensifiers are concerned with the degree that scales the element to which the intensifiers applied to a point either higher than the norm or lower. Thus, the writers’ involvement with or detachment from a statement can be reflected through the use of intensifiers. This paper explores the use of intensifiers by Kurdish authors in comparison to non-Kurdish authors who write opinion articles on Rudaw portal. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how these two groups of authors differ in their preference for the use of intensifiers. To this end, two corpora were compiled: Kurdish authors (COKA) and non-Kurdish authors (CONKA). The online interface of UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) in Wmatrix was employed to identify the semantic categories of intensifiers. The results showed that boosters had the highest frequency (140 in COKA and 280 in CONKA). However, the use of all categories was higher by the non-Kurdish authors and with wider range of lexicons than the Kurd...
This paper describes the processes that went into the design and development of the Learner Entre... more This paper describes the processes that went into the design and development of the Learner Entrepreneurship Corpus (LEC), a specialised corpus that contains pedagogical sales e-mails written by undergraduates at a Malaysian public university. It describes in detail the processes involved in data collection and selection, as well as raw data processing, which includes data coding and tagging. The tagging and coding utilised online softwares; CLAWS Tagger and AntConc. The study adopted Integrated Moves Approach (IMA) which combines both structural and syntactical analysis. This paper also discusses the evolution of corpora in Malaysia and their relevance to the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). LEC was created with the goal of providing corpus linguistic researchers with a place to explore the field, as well as ESP practitioners in Malaysia with resources for developing local-based ESP curriculum and teaching and learning materials. LEC has approximately 18 thousand words...
The communicative function of text can be obtained through the multimodal analysis of the text wh... more The communicative function of text can be obtained through the multimodal analysis of the text which contains the interaction and integration of two or more semiotic resources, graphics and text. This study investigated the structure of the titles and graphics of the title pages along with the situation of the content of native and non-native title pages of English novels of modern age. 20 title pages including 10 modern native and non-native English novels are randomly selected from the Google search engine. Multimodal analysis including Jeffries (2016) model to analyse the structure of the text of the title pages, Davy (2013) model to analyse the graphical features of the title pages and Bernstein (2003) to investigate the situational features presented in the title pages of the novels have been followed. A bench mark technique was used to identify the graphics of title pages, structure of the title phrases and situation presented in the title pages. The results generated from qu...
The goal of this study is to investigate how Reciprocal Teaching Strategies (RTS) of Language Lea... more The goal of this study is to investigate how Reciprocal Teaching Strategies (RTS) of Language Learning Strategies (LLS), proposed by Palincsar and Brown (1984), develops the writing performance of ESL students in Malaysia. A total number of 50 male and female ESL students studying in a selected college in Malaysia has been purposively selected. The participants were divided into 2 groups; a control group and an experimental group. However, the participants in the control group did not receive any treatment. This study using a mixed method is divided into three steps: pre-test, intervention, and post-test. On the pre-test, the subjects are given a written assignment followed by a series of related reading passages during the intervention and a post-test at the end. The students’ writing development is analyzed by using the computer-assisted corpus analysis (CACA) approach as proposed by Author 2 (2014). The RTS method enabled the researcher to highlight the rhetorical moves frequentl...
These day mobile phones are being resorted to as indispensable pedagogical tools for imparting la... more These day mobile phones are being resorted to as indispensable pedagogical tools for imparting language skills to the present day students who are termed as ‘Generation Y’, ‘Net Generation’ and above all ‘Digital Natives’. Mobile phones have the potential to be reliable pedagogical tool to teach writing which is the most neglected skills to the intermediate students. The current paper examines the perceptions of two lecturers regarding the use of mobile phones and PowerPoint in teaching descriptive essay writing skills to intermediate students at M.A.O. College, Lahore. The qualitative data for this purpose was collected by means of semi-structured interviews from those two lecturers who taught experimental as well as control groups respectively. The findings of the study indicated that the lecturer of experimental group was very much in favour of mobile phones to be incorporated in the teaching writing class. Even the lecturer of control group favoured the use of new technology as ...
Language teaching in the modern era needs to be underpinned by some language learning theories wh... more Language teaching in the modern era needs to be underpinned by some language learning theories which can have the potential to define the origin of the target language, its application, formation as well as understanding of as to how that language can be taught and learnt successfully. Keeping this perspective in view, the current study was undertaken by employing cooperative learning theory to enhance the writing skills of the intermediate students. The study was conducted to investigate the role of cooperative learning strategies on the writing skills of the intermediate students in the M.A.O College, Lahore, Pakistan. Total 90 science students enrolled in the said college participated in the study. In order to ascertain whether both experimental and control group students had significant difference in their overall mean scores, the pre and post-test were given to both groups. The quantitative data thus gathered was processed in the SPSS version 22 whereby Independent Samples t-te...
Demi menghadapi kesan globalisasi, Pegawai-pegawai kastam terutamanya yang bertugas di pintu masu... more Demi menghadapi kesan globalisasi, Pegawai-pegawai kastam terutamanya yang bertugas di pintu masuk ke negara ini, adalah digesa supaya mempertingkatkan keupayaan diri masing-m,asing dalam bidang-bidang yang berkaitan. Antara lain, ialah kemahiran berkomunikasi dnegan berkesan, yang melibatkan pelabgai bahsa. Pegawai-pegawai kastam ini bertindak sebagai duta bagi negara ini. Bahasa Inggeris sering digunakan sebagai alat komunikasi, terutamanya di dalam memberi serta mendapatkan maklumat. Bhasa Inggeris merupakan bahasa kedua bagi rakyat Malaysia dan telah diajar dari peringkat sekolah rendah, menengah hingga ke tahap pengajian tinggi sistem pendidikan Malaysia. Hasil dari pendidikan ini, kebanyakan individu-individu yang bekerka termasuk Pegawai-Pegawai Kastam, menggunakan bahasa ini dalam melaksanakan dan menyempurnakan tugas harian mereka. Pengkaji menjalankan kajian ini untuk menonjolkan keperluan latihan berkomunikasi menggunakan bahasa Inggeris, dikalangan pegawai-pegawai kastam...
Most scholars have studied written discourse both in academic and professional setting within the... more Most scholars have studied written discourse both in academic and professional setting within the scope of genre-based analysis, which demonstrate an increase interest in analysing the rhetorical structure of written texts. Conversely, there is a dearth of research in Malaysia that explains the rhetorical structure of argumentative essays from a genre analysis perspective. This paper introduces a genre-based corpus analysis using a compiled representative corpus of the argumentative essay for developing a rhetorical structure, also known as , an analytical framework to enhance the students’ writing skills. The compiled representative corpus was consisted of 24 argumentative essays. As a qualitative study, a corpus–based analysis is employed to explore the distinguished move patterns used in the argumentative essays. Using Hyland’s (1990) 11 move pattern as an analytical framework of the argumentative essay, this study revealed a list of moves and steps which were signaled by the ...
Jurnal Pengabdian dan Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Indonesia
El-Hasan Mosque is located in the denizen association Rukun Warga (RW) XII, Resonegaran habitatio... more El-Hasan Mosque is located in the denizen association Rukun Warga (RW) XII, Resonegaran habitation, Terban Village. Resonegaran is west of Purbonegaran Village, on the east side of Prof. Yohanes Street. Because of the mosque's renovation, The Quran education has temporarily stopped in the Quran education park located within the El-Hasan Mosque. Therefore, during the renovation’s vacuum period for Quran education, community service helped increase children's understanding of Islam and bring children closer to the Quran through recitation assistance, Iqro’ (reading), and memorizing the Juz’amma, short verses. The Qur'an Education Park activity program was implemented over the course of nine meetings with a total of twelve hours. The first six meetings were scheduled for six hours, one hour for each meeting, and the last three meetings for six hours, two hours for each meeting. The last three meetings were for memorization checks for the participants, which took longer time...
This study aims to investigate the frequency level of ‘nouns’ used in poems written by the underg... more This study aims to investigate the frequency level of ‘nouns’ used in poems written by the undergraduates of Universiti Teknologi MARA Kampus Machang based on Paul Nation’s headword list. The importance of knowing the frequency will determine teacher’s priority in teaching vocabulary. The effect of teacher’s implementation of standard nouns in classroom should reflect in the target behavior of the learner as they utilize the word in writing and mostly in communicating. The methodology used in this mini-scaled investigation of the written communication is the Computer-Assisted Corpus Analysis (CACA). Ten poems written by ten undergraduate students were collected and analysed by Tagger C5 tagset to identify the ‘nouns’ and separate it from other content words. Subsequently, ‘nouns’ frequencies were calculated by using AntConc software in order to determine the type of noun that most frequently occurred in the student’s writing. The list of 107 words was then compared to Paul Nation’s ...
The study explains the difficulties of writing faced by Bangladeshi higher secondary students and... more The study explains the difficulties of writing faced by Bangladeshi higher secondary students and gives the possible solution to overcome them. Several studies have been conducted to investigate the implementation of media like Facebook, YouTube, and mobile phone among Bangladeshi postgraduates and undergraduates’ students to improve their academic writing. However, few studies have focused on the writing challenges that Bangladeshi High school students faced in their writing by using newspaper. This study also attempts to investigate the impact of using newspaper to secondary school students to enhance their communicative competence in writing. In particular, this study employs the explanatory sequential mixed methods design as a means of researching the reciprocity between newspaper use and its effects on the writing skill. Data was collected by using pretest, posttest, and a semi-structure interview. Collected data was analysed quantitatively սѕіոg tհе Stаtіѕtіϲаӏ Pаϲkаgе fοr Sοϲ...
Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, May 31, 2022
The pandemic has intensified issues faced by the journalism community in Malaysia. This study is ... more The pandemic has intensified issues faced by the journalism community in Malaysia. This study is an attempt to help the media industries upskill themselves in terms of the written discourse. This study describes the rhetorical structures in Malaysian newspaper reports, namely The Star, in terms of the rhetorical moves and steps by using the genre theory, corpus-based discourse analysis and corpus analysis. MyCORONAS (Malaysian Corpus of Online Newspaper Articles) corpus of 90 selected news reports consisting of crime news (TSC), environmental news (TSE) and political news (TSP) was compiled and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively to identify the frequency, functions, and patterns of rhetorical moves. The findings identified a nine-move structure for the newspaper reports. The nine-move structure consists of five optional moves and four obligatory moves. Variations in the use of the steps were observed within the subgenres. Additionally, based on the functions of the moves, it was found that the newspaper report is a hybrid genre with various communicative functions. Based on the patterns of move distribution, the dispersion value shows that the moves are tightly clustered. To conclude, the findings of this study will heighten the awareness of ESP learners on the importance of using appropriate rhetorical moves to write a newspaper report which will help the journalism industries reform themselves during the pandemic.
International Journal of Language Education and Applied Linguistics
Understanding the differences in communication styles is becoming increasingly important in busin... more Understanding the differences in communication styles is becoming increasingly important in business communication as more companies expand their operations to include local and international operations. The purpose of this article is to compare the structural moves employed in the Singaporean and Malaysian promotional genres from the standpoint of moves analysis and comparison. Argument arises on the similarity and dissimilarity of business discourses involving the features of genres between these two neighbouring countries. As a result, a structural linguistics analysis was conducted in order to investigate the variations in communicative purposes as well as the lexical frequency of the sales emails that were written. The comparison between Singaporean sales promotional letter and Malaysian sales emails moves is based on Bhatia's (1993) Singaporean sales promotional letter moves. According to Bhatia's sales letter framework, there are seven moves, whereas in this study, se...
Koya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Semantically, intensifiers are concerned with the degree that scales the element to which the int... more Semantically, intensifiers are concerned with the degree that scales the element to which the intensifiers applied to a point either higher than the norm or lower. Thus, the writers’ involvement with or detachment from a statement can be reflected through the use of intensifiers. This paper explores the use of intensifiers by Kurdish authors in comparison to non-Kurdish authors who write opinion articles on Rudaw portal. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how these two groups of authors differ in their preference for the use of intensifiers. To this end, two corpora were compiled: Kurdish authors (COKA) and non-Kurdish authors (CONKA). The online interface of UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) in Wmatrix was employed to identify the semantic categories of intensifiers. The results showed that boosters had the highest frequency (140 in COKA and 280 in CONKA). However, the use of all categories was higher by the non-Kurdish authors and with wider range of lexicons than the Kurd...
This paper describes the processes that went into the design and development of the Learner Entre... more This paper describes the processes that went into the design and development of the Learner Entrepreneurship Corpus (LEC), a specialised corpus that contains pedagogical sales e-mails written by undergraduates at a Malaysian public university. It describes in detail the processes involved in data collection and selection, as well as raw data processing, which includes data coding and tagging. The tagging and coding utilised online softwares; CLAWS Tagger and AntConc. The study adopted Integrated Moves Approach (IMA) which combines both structural and syntactical analysis. This paper also discusses the evolution of corpora in Malaysia and their relevance to the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). LEC was created with the goal of providing corpus linguistic researchers with a place to explore the field, as well as ESP practitioners in Malaysia with resources for developing local-based ESP curriculum and teaching and learning materials. LEC has approximately 18 thousand words...
The communicative function of text can be obtained through the multimodal analysis of the text wh... more The communicative function of text can be obtained through the multimodal analysis of the text which contains the interaction and integration of two or more semiotic resources, graphics and text. This study investigated the structure of the titles and graphics of the title pages along with the situation of the content of native and non-native title pages of English novels of modern age. 20 title pages including 10 modern native and non-native English novels are randomly selected from the Google search engine. Multimodal analysis including Jeffries (2016) model to analyse the structure of the text of the title pages, Davy (2013) model to analyse the graphical features of the title pages and Bernstein (2003) to investigate the situational features presented in the title pages of the novels have been followed. A bench mark technique was used to identify the graphics of title pages, structure of the title phrases and situation presented in the title pages. The results generated from qu...
The goal of this study is to investigate how Reciprocal Teaching Strategies (RTS) of Language Lea... more The goal of this study is to investigate how Reciprocal Teaching Strategies (RTS) of Language Learning Strategies (LLS), proposed by Palincsar and Brown (1984), develops the writing performance of ESL students in Malaysia. A total number of 50 male and female ESL students studying in a selected college in Malaysia has been purposively selected. The participants were divided into 2 groups; a control group and an experimental group. However, the participants in the control group did not receive any treatment. This study using a mixed method is divided into three steps: pre-test, intervention, and post-test. On the pre-test, the subjects are given a written assignment followed by a series of related reading passages during the intervention and a post-test at the end. The students’ writing development is analyzed by using the computer-assisted corpus analysis (CACA) approach as proposed by Author 2 (2014). The RTS method enabled the researcher to highlight the rhetorical moves frequentl...
These day mobile phones are being resorted to as indispensable pedagogical tools for imparting la... more These day mobile phones are being resorted to as indispensable pedagogical tools for imparting language skills to the present day students who are termed as ‘Generation Y’, ‘Net Generation’ and above all ‘Digital Natives’. Mobile phones have the potential to be reliable pedagogical tool to teach writing which is the most neglected skills to the intermediate students. The current paper examines the perceptions of two lecturers regarding the use of mobile phones and PowerPoint in teaching descriptive essay writing skills to intermediate students at M.A.O. College, Lahore. The qualitative data for this purpose was collected by means of semi-structured interviews from those two lecturers who taught experimental as well as control groups respectively. The findings of the study indicated that the lecturer of experimental group was very much in favour of mobile phones to be incorporated in the teaching writing class. Even the lecturer of control group favoured the use of new technology as ...
Language teaching in the modern era needs to be underpinned by some language learning theories wh... more Language teaching in the modern era needs to be underpinned by some language learning theories which can have the potential to define the origin of the target language, its application, formation as well as understanding of as to how that language can be taught and learnt successfully. Keeping this perspective in view, the current study was undertaken by employing cooperative learning theory to enhance the writing skills of the intermediate students. The study was conducted to investigate the role of cooperative learning strategies on the writing skills of the intermediate students in the M.A.O College, Lahore, Pakistan. Total 90 science students enrolled in the said college participated in the study. In order to ascertain whether both experimental and control group students had significant difference in their overall mean scores, the pre and post-test were given to both groups. The quantitative data thus gathered was processed in the SPSS version 22 whereby Independent Samples t-te...
Demi menghadapi kesan globalisasi, Pegawai-pegawai kastam terutamanya yang bertugas di pintu masu... more Demi menghadapi kesan globalisasi, Pegawai-pegawai kastam terutamanya yang bertugas di pintu masuk ke negara ini, adalah digesa supaya mempertingkatkan keupayaan diri masing-m,asing dalam bidang-bidang yang berkaitan. Antara lain, ialah kemahiran berkomunikasi dnegan berkesan, yang melibatkan pelabgai bahsa. Pegawai-pegawai kastam ini bertindak sebagai duta bagi negara ini. Bahasa Inggeris sering digunakan sebagai alat komunikasi, terutamanya di dalam memberi serta mendapatkan maklumat. Bhasa Inggeris merupakan bahasa kedua bagi rakyat Malaysia dan telah diajar dari peringkat sekolah rendah, menengah hingga ke tahap pengajian tinggi sistem pendidikan Malaysia. Hasil dari pendidikan ini, kebanyakan individu-individu yang bekerka termasuk Pegawai-Pegawai Kastam, menggunakan bahasa ini dalam melaksanakan dan menyempurnakan tugas harian mereka. Pengkaji menjalankan kajian ini untuk menonjolkan keperluan latihan berkomunikasi menggunakan bahasa Inggeris, dikalangan pegawai-pegawai kastam...
Most scholars have studied written discourse both in academic and professional setting within the... more Most scholars have studied written discourse both in academic and professional setting within the scope of genre-based analysis, which demonstrate an increase interest in analysing the rhetorical structure of written texts. Conversely, there is a dearth of research in Malaysia that explains the rhetorical structure of argumentative essays from a genre analysis perspective. This paper introduces a genre-based corpus analysis using a compiled representative corpus of the argumentative essay for developing a rhetorical structure, also known as , an analytical framework to enhance the students’ writing skills. The compiled representative corpus was consisted of 24 argumentative essays. As a qualitative study, a corpus–based analysis is employed to explore the distinguished move patterns used in the argumentative essays. Using Hyland’s (1990) 11 move pattern as an analytical framework of the argumentative essay, this study revealed a list of moves and steps which were signaled by the ...
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Papers by Associate Professor Dr. Manvender Kaur Singh