Blog-based online journals for English As A Second Language learners

The research on the use of blogs as online journals was carried out with a group of twenty five Form Four students in a secondary school in Kuantan, Pahang. The aim of the research is to find out the effects of blogs as a tool in developing writing in English as A Second Language. The instruments include questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and analysis of the blogs content. The research covered students’ perspectives of blogs as the medium for online journals, the effectiveness of blogs as a tool to assist students’ writing skill and to what extent blogs could help students to enhance their writing skills. From the findings, it is discovered that there is a positive impact on the development of students’ writing throughout the research as gained through the instruments. From the research, the students claimed that blogs is an interesting medium for them to write their journals as compared to writing in their log books. Blogs also could help them developed their writing skill in English Language; and through the various features in blogs, students were able to write more effectively

A role for genre-based pedagogy in academic writing instruction?: an EAP perspective

In this paper I discuss the use of genre as a theoretical construct in academic writing instruction in the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. I begin by considering the notion of discourse competence as a concept that accounts for the knowledge elements and skills employed by expert academic writers, and then consider genre as a way of operationalizing the different elements of discourse competence knowledge for the purpose of writing instruction. I review briefly the diversity of approaches to theorizing genre knowledge, and then present the dual social genre/cognitive genre approach that I have used as a basis for research and course design in an EAP context. I exemplify this model by summarizing the key elements of two studies of research genres in which I have used this model. I conclude with a brief theoretical discussion of the issue of construct validity in relation to using the concept of genre in research that relates to writing instruction

A Study of the Integration of Communicative Competence (Cc) Features in Teaching the Oral Skills (Listening and Speaking) to English Majors at the Department of English, University of Benghazi/ Libya

Since its advent in the 1970s, the notion of communicative competence (CC) has a tremendous influence on English language teaching, trends, theories, models, and paradigms. Since the 1970s, applied linguists, second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and educationalists have accepted the notion of communicative competence (CC) as the underpinning theory of second language acquisition, the objective of communicative language teaching approach (CLT), and as a measurement of language learner’s proficiency. The purpose of this study was to investigate the inclusion, teaching and testing of the features of the notion of communicative competence (CC) in teaching the oral skills to the English majors. In addition, this study investigated the instructors and the students’ perceptions of the notion of CC features when teaching and learning the oral skills. The study investigated the teaching and learning of four characteristics of CC, namely, linguistic, sociolinguistic, strategic and pragmatic. These four characteristics were clearly identified using pedagogical criteria extracted from the prominent CC frameworks of Bachman (1990), Bachman and Palmer (1996), Canale (1983) Canale and Swain (1980) , Celce-Murcia, (1995, 2007), and Hymens, (1972). This study also used CC pedagogical specifications recognized by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The informants were head of the English department (N = 1), instructors (N = 5), and students (N = 54). The tools of data collection were questionnaires, textbook evaluation, and student self-evaluation competence descriptors. The analysis involved quantitative / qualitative approach using Atlis.ti, SPSS and Excel. The results showed that though both the instructors and students perceived the high importance of teaching the different characteristics of CC ( linguistic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic , strategic) in the oral skills course, the focus of the teaching material, teaching practice and test content was on the linguistic competence and very little was done to promote the other CC components. The results also evidenced. Moreover, the student competence self-descriptive can- do-statements results showed that the students have high control over linguistic competence descriptors and low control on the pragmatic, sociolinguistic and strategic competence descriptors. The results suggest that there is a discrepancy between the learners’ expectations and perceptions of their language learning and the reality of teaching and learning the notion of communicative competence

Statically Checking Web API Requests in JavaScript

Many JavaScript applications perform HTTP requests to web APIs, relying on the request URL, HTTP method, and request data to be constructed correctly by string operations. Traditional compile-time error checking, such as calling a non-existent method in Java, are not available for checking whether such requests comply with the requirements of a web API. In this paper, we propose an approach to statically check web API requests in JavaScript. Our approach first extracts a request's URL string, HTTP method, and the corresponding request data using an inter-procedural string analysis, and then checks whether the request conforms to given web API specifications. We evaluated our approach by checking whether web API requests in JavaScript files mined from GitHub are consistent or inconsistent with publicly available API specifications. From the 6575 requests in scope, our approach determined whether the request's URL and HTTP method was consistent or inconsistent with web API specifications with a precision of 96.0%. Our approach also correctly determined whether extracted request data was consistent or inconsistent with the data requirements with a precision of 87.9% for payload data and 99.9% for query data. In a systematic analysis of the inconsistent cases, we found that many of them were due to errors in the client code. The here proposed checker can be integrated with code editors or with continuous integration tools to warn programmers about code containing potentially erroneous requests.Comment: International Conference on Software Engineering, 201