izah Mohd Noor

Using a blended approach to teach English for academic purposes: Malaysian students' perceptions of redesigned course materials

Abstract English for Social Sciences is a compulsory course for all students of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Recently, the course has been redesigned and a new course book which includes an online component was introduced. The purpose of the study reported in this article is to investigate students’ perceptions of the blended approach for learning English for Academic Purposes. A qualitative approach, in the form of nine focus group interviews involving 34 students from various disciplines, was used to collect data. The thrust of the interviews is to investigate students’ perceptions of the course book and its online component in meeting their English language needs, different proficiency levels and diverse interests. The challenges and problems faced by them were also probed. The findings of the study reveal that the students’ perceptions of the course book in meeting their language needs were generally positive although some higher proficiency students did not find the content challenging enough. The online component was also well received but two major problems and challenges were identified: slow and unreliable internet connection and too much online exercises to complete. Possible solutions to these problems were also proposed.

Influence of social networking on Malaysian female secondary students:a qualitative study across three schools

Social networking (SN) allows individuals to make connections with each other for both social and business purposes. The purpose of this research study is to find out the influence of SN on students from three Malaysian secondary schools by comparing their attitudes and behaviour towards SN besides finding out whether they are aware of the risks and danger involved, and how they handle them. These schools are all normal day schools and are located in three different types of school environments in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur namely: urban, suburban and rural. Focus groups interviews were conducted on these students who were asked to give their response to seven scenarios depicting negative situations involving SN such as texting, cyberbullying, and hacking and identity theft. The findings revealed that these students were not very different from those in the west in that they are aware of risks involving in SN and will stay clear of risky behaviours. However, students in these three schools handled the problems related to SN in a more direct manner compared to the elite students in Thang et al.’s (2016) study. In particular, students in School C which is a rural school seemed to be less perturbed over the negative consequences of SN compared to students in the other schools.