Lexical Features Of Engineering English Vs. General English

The knowledge on the features of the English varieties is essential to understand the differences and similarities of the varieties for second language teaching and learning,either for general proficiency (EGP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes.This paper demonstrates a corpus-based comparison of the lexical features between an ESP variety (Engineering English) and a General English (GE).Two corpora are used in the study; the Engineering English Corpus (EEC) acts as the representation of the specialized language,and the British National Corpus (BNC) as the General English (GE).The analyses are conducted by employing the WordList functions of a linguistic software – Wordsmith. Discussions on the differences (or similarities) of these two corpora include general statistics,text coverage and vocabulary size. The empirical findings in this study highlight the general lexical features of both corpora. The analyses verify that the Engineering English has less varied vocabulary,but higher text coverage than the GE; in other words,most of the words are used repeatedly throughout the EEC.Thus,this study further emphasizes the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences for language description

What do different word lists reveal about the lexical features of a specialised language?

Most corpus-based investigations capitalise on word list analyses: frequency, keyword, and key-keywords, in profiling the lexical features of a specialised language. Though the three word lists have been used in many corpus-based language studies, comparisons across these three types of word lists in characterising a specialised language has not been made to identify any salient information each word list can reveal about the target language. This paper provides comparisons of Engineering English using three types of word list: frequency, keyword and key-keyword lists. The purpose is to identify the lexical information that can be revealed by the groups of words listed according to each type of word lists. To conduct the analyses, a corpus of Engineering English (E2C) is created. All the word lists from the corpus are extracted using the Wordsmith software. Next, further analyses on the distribution of the vocabulary components, namely function vs. content words, and word categories i.e. GSL, AWL and Others, are conducted on all the three word lists. The findings reveal that different word lists result in different ranges of words, and the analyses of the words reveal the distinct features of the specialised language at different levels. Given such differences, this study provides insights into which word lists are to be considered in a lexical study for language description purposes. Hence, this study further verifies the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences for language description

Extracting Significant Words In Engineering Texts For Specialised Language Descriptions

The academic discourse of a specialised language is characterised by specialised and technical vocabulary, and lexicogrammar. Studies on language description suggest the need to explore and determine the specific characteristics of the academic discourse of each specialised language, to serve the language needs of the learners. This study demonstrates an exploration of this discipline specificity by looking at the nouns used in a specialised language - an Engineering English. It attempts to integrate a multivariate technique, i.e. the Correspondence Analysis (CA), as a tool to extract significant nouns in a specialised language for any further language use scrutiny. CA allows visual representations of the word interrelationships across different genres in a specialised language. To exemplify this, an Engineering English Corpus (E2C) was created. E2C is composed of two sub-corpora (genres): Engineering reference books (RBC) and online journals articles (EJC). The British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. 30 key-key-nouns were identified from the E2C, and the frequency lists of the words were retrieved from all the corpora to run the CA. The CA maps of the nouns display how these corpora are different from each other, as well as, which words characterise not only E2C from a general corpus (BNC), but also the different genres in E2C. Thus, CA proves to be a potential tool to display words which characterise not only a specialised corpus from a general corpus, but also the different genres in that specialised corpus. This study promises more informed descriptions of a specialised language can be made with the identification of specific and significant vocabulary for any academic discourse investigation

Lexical Features of Engineering English vs. General English

The knowledge on the features of the English varieties is essential to understand the differences and similarities of the varieties for second language teaching and learning, either for general proficiency (EGP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. This paper demonstrates a corpus-based comparison of the lexical features between an ESP variety (Engineering English) and a General English (GE). Two corpora are used in the study; the Engineering English Corpus (EEC) acts as the representation of the specialized language, and the British National Corpus (BNC) as the General English (GE). The analyses are conducted by employing the WordList functions of a linguistic software – Wordsmith. Discussions on the differences (or similarities) of these two corpora include general statistics, text coverage and vocabulary size. The empirical findings in this study highlight the general lexical features of both corpora. The analyses verify that the Engineering English has less varied vocabulary, but higher text coverage than the GE; in other words, most of the words are used repeatedly throughout the EEC. Thus, this study further emphasizes the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences for language description

Internet Banking: Analysing encouragement and impediment factors among academicians

The paper aims to explore the encouragement and impediment factors for consumers to adopt internet banking services. The study should provide effective strategies for banking institutions on how to maximise the rate of adoption. A survey involving a sample size of 200 was conducted by sending questionnaires to lecturers in 20 public universities in Malaysia. The Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour model (DTPB)was used. While "Perceived Usefulness" and "Features of websites" were the top factors which encourage the adoption of internet banking,"Culture" was the most significant impediment in adoption. In terms of moderating variables, only a few variables show significant impact on certain factors. Age and income impacted only on "External environment" whereas WAP feature had an impact only on "Perceived usefulness'. Other variables have not shown significant effect on the factors. The findings suggest that banking institutions should plan effective strategies to enhance the push factors and to counter the barrier of culture in order to enhance internet banking adoption. This study offers valuable strategies for marketers to rethink how to educate potential customers and promote internet banking using innovative approaches. Recommendations are offered to financial institutions to plan effective strategies to enhance adoption of internet banking. The potential factors influencing internet banking adoption also provide useful insights for other developing countries

Development Of Multilingual Social Media Data Corpus: Development And Evaluation

The purpose of this study is manual annotating, a corpus for Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu. Corpus for both languages has been made by many researchers before, but the focus of this research is only on words with the same vocabulary but which have very different meanings. The data were obtained from social media, so informal words were found. As many as 2100 words for each language were identified which were then randomly selected so that 300 words with the same vocabulary but with different meanings were used. The objective of this study was to confirm that this condition can influence the results of polarity sentiment. At the end of this paper, we will show the results of the influence of the conditions of the two languages on the polarity of sentiments. From the manual annotation, an annotation agreement test was made by three Bahasa Indonesia annotators and three Bahasa Melayu annotators. The results of the annotation found that there were 63 out of 300 words that experience different polarity. Results of score agreement among annotations for each language show that there is good agreement among the annotators during annotation proces

Omni Directional Indoor Mobile Robot

This paper presents an approach which uses an omni–directional robot for indoor use. The use of the omni-directional robot describes a ‘no head no tail’ robot. This will reduce movement recovery in time and space. In additions its mechanism makes it possible to run as a reactive robot without any complex programming. This robot is designed to use an algorithm control (reactive) based on the vision control system. The aim of this project is to design an indoor mobile robot for jogging partner operation

A Literature Research On Machine Learning Techniques Used For Training Annotated Corpus

The development of research in the annotation area is growing. Researchers perform annotation task using various forms of datasets such as text, sound, images, and videos. Various algorithms are used to perform tasks. The purpose of this survey is to find out algorithms that are often used by researchers to perform annotation tasks, especially on text data. The literature surveys thirteen research papers on text annotation from the last 5 years. The results of this review indicate that SVM is the algorithm used for all three annotation methods: manual, automatic and semi-automatic annotation, with a significant accuracy above 80%. The result of this survey will be referred by the authors as the basis for subsequent research that will be conducted, especially in the semi-automatic annotation method

An effective virtual laboratory approach for chemistry

Virtual laboratories, currently used as an approach to virtual learning, have long been adopted in the teaching and learning process in many schools. The objectives of this paper are to develop a multimedia virtual reality laboratory for Chemistry (VLab-Chem) and to conduct an effectiveness testing on the virtual laboratory approach. The VLab-Chem was developed based on the Cognitivist-Constructivist-Contextual Life Cycle Development model (KHK3-VLab-Chem). The effectiveness testing of the virtual laboratory VLab-Chem was conducted based on the quasi-experimental approach, adopting the ethnographic observational technique, through a case study of a Smart School in Melaka. The study involved two groups, Control (K) and Experimental (E) groups, and the t-test measurement was adopted. Results indicated that the Experimental group (E), who underwent the teaching and learning process using VLab-Chem had a higher achievement level in comparison with the control group (K), who experienced the conventional approach to teaching and learning. This paper implies the effectiveness of the VLab-Chem in a chemistry classroom. For future work, it is recommended that the instructional design (ID) model of VLab-Chem includes the three-dimensional (3D) setting through immersive technology during an experiment by using Data Glove or Head-Mount Display (HMD). This would allow users to experience touching the equipment and materials with their own hands

Assessing the Use of Mobile Technology for Technical English

Mobile technology in a new learning paradigm indicates the use of mobile and wireless technologies which scaffold the teaching and learning dimension in most tertiary institutions. The objective of this paper is to assess the level of students’ readiness in using a mobile technology for Technical English in one of the technical universities in Malaysia. A quantitative analysis was used through a survey method in which 200 survey questionnaires were sent out to randomly selected students in engineering faculties at the Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka. The findings showed that the majority of students were ready to embark for a mobile-based learning as they had mobile phones equipped with a 3G service for class notes retrieval, multimedia messaging services, video call services for easy interaction among peers and with tutors. The results provide useful guidelines for curriculum designers and educators. Future work should integrate the perspectives of administrative units and educators to gain an overall assessment of the mobile technology readiness from various dimensions