Goh Ying Soon

Students’ Awareness in Learning of New Vocabulary in Chinese Fantasy Novel Among Non-native Malay Learners of Chinese

Teaching new vocabulary to non-native speakers of Chinese Language is not easy. The awareness of Malay student in learning new vocabulary in the Chinese fantasy novel should be given ample attentions. Systematic way of vocabulary instruction has to be followed in ensuring that the process of learning new vocabulary in the Chinese fantasy novel occurs. In order to allow students to access learning materials anytime they want all the learning materials has been uploaded in the i-learn system (http://i-learn.uitm.edu.my/). Hereby, this study was undertaken to measure the extent to which students’ awareness of learning new vocabulary in Chinese fantasy novel has occurred. The students were asked to fill out a set of questionnaire online after having learned in a couple of weeks, the learning materials which was provided systematically. The findings of the study are positive. It was found that these Chinese fantasy novel-based learning materials can be used as additional material in the procurement of new vocabulary. Students are willing and able to accept Chinese fantasy novel as learning support materials in acquiring new vocabulary. A few suggestions are also presented as a measure of improvement in the use of Chinese fantasy novel as learning materials to enhance new vocabulary learning.

Enhancement of Mandarin courseware through formative evaluation

A Mandarin courseware has been developed initially to help Bumiputera students to improve in Mandarin pronunciations and speaking skills in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Terengganu. Before the courseware could be distributed to students, a formative evaluation has been done to guarantee its quality as a supplementary learning material. The study has been conducted during July 2008 - November 2008 semester which involved 32 Bachelor of Business Computing students at UiTM Terengganu. The formative evaluation has been carried out using paper based questionnaire presented to the students to evaluate different aspects of the courseware. The result reveals that most of the students agreed that the courseware could be used as a supplementary learning material. Among the recommendations from the students were to improve certain audio with unclear sounds in the Phonetics and Dictionary parts and to enhance the animation in the Chapter section. Based on the evaluation result, the enhancement of the Mandarin courseware was made by stages starting from Dec 2008 - April 2009 semester. There were 3 main things that have been enhanced since the first formative evaluation. The enhancements were the addition of English version of the courseware, the design of new interface (screen design) and the improvement of the sounds in most parts of the courseware.