Chek Kim Loi

Malay ESL Students’ Difficulties in Using English Prepositions

The study attempts to undertake an error analysis of prepositions employed in the written work of Form 4 Malay ESL (English as a Second Language) students in Malaysia. The error analysis was undertaken using Richards’s (1974) framework of intralingual and interlingual errors and Bennett’s (1975) framework in identifying prepositional concepts found in the sample. The study first identified common prepositional errors in the written texts of 150 student participants. It then measured the relative intensities of these errors and found out possible causes for the occurrences of these errors. In this study, one significant finding is that among the nine concepts of prepositions examined, the participant students tended to make the most number of errors in the use of prepositions of time and place. The present study has pedagogical implications in teaching English prepositions to Malay ESL students.

A Comparison Between Malay and English Research Article Discussions: A Move Analysis

This study investigated the rhetorical organization of Malay and English research article discussions. A move analysis was carried out for the two sets of data of the present study based on a modified version of Peacock’s model for the discussion section. For this purpose, a total of 40 research article discussions restricted to empirical studies (20 from each corpus) were randomly selected from journals in the field of education. Results show that Malay discussions are more context dependent while English discussions are more context independent and standalone. In addition, compared with its English-language counterparts, the fit between Peacock’s model and Malay discussions is partial. This phenomenon may be due to the preference for rhetorical concepts and values in the local writing community. The findings have pedagogical implications in an English for Academic Purposes classroom.