Zuraidah Mohd Don

Effects of computer-based educational achievement test on test performance and test takers' motivation

Abstract There has been an increasing interest in recent years in developing and using computer-based tests in educational assessment. To replace paper-based tests with computer-based ones, the standards for developing computerized-assessment ( International Test Commission., 2004 ) requires equivalent test scores to be established for the new computer-based test and the conventional paper-based test. However, in most test mode comparability studies, the actual test items used have been identical, and yet significant differences have been found in test scores in paper-based and computer-based modes. This has been reported for several subjects, including science, languages and mathematics. The validity of using computer-based tests in educational assessment must therefore be questioned. This study involves a biology test and a biology motivation questionnaire using a Solomon four-group experimental design to examine the validity of the computer-based test and its effects on test performance and the motivation of test-takers. The findings provide supportive evidence for the validity of computer-based test in educational assessment.

Representing immigrants as illegals, threats and victims in Malaysia: Elite voices in the media:

This article examines the way the voices of political elites are incorporated in news reporting to represent refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia as illegals, threats and victims, which reflect their ideological positioning. We also examine voices that foreground their plight and appeal for the relaxation of rules. Selected extracts are analysed to illustrate how these voices and authorial accounts are ordered in relation to each other to represent different perspectives for different purposes. To address the issue of how texts from the original are brought into the new context, we examine the relationship between the original text and the recontextualized part. Using tools from Van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network model and Reisigl and Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, we analyse how the discursive strategies and different features of a text are used to construct particular meaning in the social world.

Rules and Algorithms for Phonetic Transcription of Standard Malay

Phonetic transcription of text is an indispensable component of text-to-speech (TTS) systems and is used in acoustic modeling for speech recognition and other natural language processing applications. One approach to the transcription of written text into phonetic entities or sounds is to use a set of well-defined context and language-dependent rules. The process of transcribing text into sounds starts by preprocessing the text and representing it by lexical items to which the rules are applicable. The rules can be segregated into phonemic and phonetic rules. Phonemic rules operate on graphemes to convert them into phonemes. Phonetic rules operate on phonemes and convert them into context-dependent phonetic entities with actual sounds. Converting from written text into actual sounds, developing a comprehensive set of rules, and transforming the rules into implementable algorithms for any language cause several problems that have their origins in the relative lack of correspondence between the spelling of the lexical items and their sound contents. For Standard Malay (SM) these problems are not as severe as those for languages of complex spelling systems, such as English and French, but they do exist. In this paper, developing a comprehensive computerized system for processing SM text and transcribing it into phonetic entities and evaluating the performance of this system, irrespective of the application, is discussed. In particular, the following issues are dealt with in this paper: (1) the spelling and other problems of SM writing and their impact on converting graphemes into phonemes, (2) the development of a comprehensive set of grapheme-to-phoneme rules for SM, (3) a description of the phonetic variations of SM or how the phonemes of SM vary in context and the development of a set of phoneme-to-phonetic transcription rules, (4) the formulation of the phonemic and phonetic rules into algorithms that are applicable to the computer-based processing of input SM text, and (5) the evaluation of the performance of the process of converting SM text into actual sounds by the above mentioned methods.

Nationhood and Malaysian identity: a corpus-based approach

Abstract In this article we make use of the methodology of corpus linguistics to organize and search the several millions of words contained in the published speeches of Tun Dr. Mahathir as prime minister. Our corpus consists of over 2.5 million words of speeches, roughly half in English and half in Malay, with over 900 English speeches and over 800 Malay speeches. This study concentrates on the Malay speeches, and follows up previous work on Dr. Mahathirs English speeches. The approach is entirely data driven. Instead of making a subjective choice of words to investigate, we begin by identifying key words. We then use the ranked list of key words to investigate the immediate context in which those words occur. By concentrating on key words connected to Malaysian identity, we obtain a remarkable insight into how that identity is presented by Dr. Mahathir.

The discursive representation of Iran's supreme leader in online media

This study examines the interplay of politics, religion and discourse in the representation of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in government-controlled news websites in Iran. It is grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Van Leeuwen’s social actor network model (2008) is used as the theoretical framework to analyse the linguistic representation of the Iranian leader. In the samples analysed, Khamenei is discursively depicted by features associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Imams of the Shia tradition. Such representations elevate the authority of Khamenei in texts, and naturalise the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih, which authorises a Faqih (Jurist) to assume political leadership in Iran. In this way, the texts are used to maintain and reinforce the dominance of people in positions of power.

Adding an Emotions Filter to Malay Text-to-Speech System

In this paper we present the findings of our research which aims to develop an emotions filter that can be added to an existing Malay text-to-speech system to produce an output expressing happiness, anger, sadness and fear. The end goal is to produce an output that is as natural as possible, thus contributing towards the enhancement of the existing system. The emotions filter was developed by manipulating pitch and duration of the output using a rule-based approach. The data was made up of emotional sentences produced by a female native speaker of Malay. The information extracted from the analysis was used to develop the filter. The emotional speech output underwent several acceptance tests. The results showed that the emotions filter developed was compatible with FASIH and other TTS systems using the rule-based approach of prosodic manipulation. However, further work need to be done to enhance the naturalness of the output.

Requests : Voices of Malaysian children

Abstract To make a request is to express a desire for the addressee to do something, and because it bears a requirement to be complied with, a request is usually best achieved when performed with tact and politeness. Bach and Harnish (1984: 48) define the term request as ‘a speech act expressing the speakers desire for the hearer to do something with the added proviso that the hearer takes this expressed desire as the reason to act’. This paper examines the many varied forms that this speech act takes in the speech of five young Malaysian children who generally use the English language to communicate with their mother. The data shows the creativity of young children for whom English is a second language in that there are many ways of making a request. Although the forms vary, the function is constant, i. e. asking for something. The various strategies used by the children, the variety of English, i. e. Malaysian English, and the use of code switching in the data will also be described.

Voices of girls with disabilities in rural Iran

This paper investigates the interaction of gender, disability and education in rural Iran, which is a relatively unexplored field of research. The responses of 10 female students with disabilities from Isfahan indicated that the obstacles they faced included marginalization, difficulties in getting from home to school, difficulties within the school building itself, and discrimination by teachers, classmates and school authorities. The data collected for the study contain a wide range of conservative gendered discourses, and show how traditional gender beliefs interact with disability to aggravate the problems faced in education by young women with disabilities. It is hoped that the findings will raise awareness among policy-makers of the many formidable obstacles that make it difficult for young women with disabilities to achieve their full potential in education.

Creating an Education Research Acculturation Theory for Research Implementation in School

This study investigates the implementation of educational research among urban secondary schools in Malaysia. The respondents include school teachers and administrators, lecturers in education institutions, and committee members of the state education departments. Data collected from interviews were coded and analyzed using open, axial and selected coding procedures. Six core categories emerged from the data namely implementation initiative, implementation obstacles, collaboration, research knowledge, research needs, and suggestions to overcome the weaknesses. The findings showed that the quality and quantity of education research in school depend on the existence of a research culture. The findings of this study form an education research acculturation theory for research implementation in schools.

Prosody generation by integrating rule and template-based approaches for emotional Malay speech synthesis

This paper presents a hybrid technique to enhance the quality of the rule-based approach to generate prosody for Malay speech synthesis by integrating prosody parametric manipulation with template parametric manipulation so as to increase the intonation variability of the synthesized output. Basically the prosodic features of the neutral synthesized speech are manipulated in an attempt to express the four basic emotions, namely happiness, anger, sadness and fear. We also present an objective methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of the synthesized output to generate the appropriate prosody in order to confirm the subjective perception tests.