The motif of the folktale is essentially the smallest and striking elements of narrative content with the ability to endure in tradition. It is divided into three categories: actor, item and single incident. These categories become the foundation that supports the built of the original motif-index of folk literature by Stith Thompson.…

The central foundation of knowledge is through grasping what is being read. Therefore, it is significant to recognise the difficulty level of a reading text for better and comprehensive understanding. The present study is an attempt to identify the word frequency level and lexical coverage of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) reading…

Speech acts are a way to conceptualize speech as an action. Speech act of flaming is an utterance that expresses insults; swearing; and hateful; intense language in hostile online interaction. Flaming is an expressive speech act and often leads to the trading of insults between members within a certain conversation. Social media is one of the…

One way to investigate learner writing is by analyzing the most frequently recurring sequences of words, that is, lexical bundles. This paper presents results for lexical bundles analyses of a Malaysian corpus (MCSAW) against its reference language variety, LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays). Key 4-word lexical bundles are firstly…

Three categories of audio recordings, a web service platform, and commercial software were involved in this analysis process. The three categories of audio recordings included eight filtered student recordings, an audio recording provided by a Mandarin instructor from University Malaysia Sabah, and an audio recording generated by Text-to-Speech…

Election campaigns are constantly regarded as a persuasive campaign to convince the nation to vote for the leader of a country. Being said such, this study investigates the discourse of twitter of two political premiers in Asia: Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak (henceforth, Najib) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (henceforth,…

This study is one of the pioneers in investigating and analyzing the orthographical conventions/norms of the outer circle Asian Englishes using one of the largest databases of English corpus, the Global Web-based English (GloWbE). This study extends the analysis of the current orthographical norms of the new varieties to their colonial parents.…

It is difficult for most of the second language learners in Malaysia to function proficiently in English language due to limited vocabulary knowledge. It has also been challenging for TESL graduates to fit in as ENP teachers due to the lack of specialized vocabulary knowledge in nursing field. Thus, a course books has always been a highly…

Although significant attention has been devoted to the notion of facework and its functions, facework among L2 speakers, whose cultural backgrounds and language proficiencies vary, has remained unexplored. The present study attempts to explore situations of intercultural communication in which facework is used as a way to remedy moments of…

The Appraisal Theory includes three subsystems of evaluation; Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. This study focuses on Graduation subsystem which is used by writers to amplify or diminish the scope of these two subsystems. It consists of Focus and Force options. Focus expressions are usually non-gradable they tend to sharpen or soften the…

This paper examines the different types of writing errors performed by 16 international postgraduate students undertaking an intensive English course at a public university in Malaysia. It was mandatory for international postgraduate students who obtained less than IELTS Band 6 to undertake an Intensive English Course (IEC) offered by the…

Group discussion forms an integral language experience for most language learners, providing them with an opportunity to express themselves in a naturalistic setting. Multi-word expressions are commonly used and one of them is lexical bundles. Lexical bundles are types of extended collocations that occur more commonly than we expect; they are…

This paper analyzes the results of a corpus-based study on the usage of metadiscourse in argumentative writing by Malaysian college students. The aims of the study is to examine the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse used by the particular students in argumentative writing as well as to analyze the errors that made by the particular…

Using corpus approach, a growing number of researchers blamed textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in natural English. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian English textbooks used in schools are reportedly prepared through a process of material development that involves intuition. Hence, a corpus-based…

This research is a corpus-based study of secondary and college ESL Malaysian learner's written work by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Past Tense Auxiliary "Be". This research studied the past tense auxiliary "be", types of past tense auxiliary "be" errors and frequency of past tense auxiliary…