A Case Study: Issues, Challenges and Coping Strategies of Student-Teachers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study explores the issues, challenges and student-teachers’ coping strategies of teaching in a classroom setting during this challenging time of the Covid-19 pandemic in a new instructional setting of online classes that replace the face-to-face classroom interaction. Purposeful sampling was employed in studying 24 student-teachers’ reflective journals through content analysis. The findings showed that most student-teachers were positive and able to cope with the issues if enough time were given to them. Based on the themes emerging from the text analysis, class management and class organisation were not the main issue. However, other main issues such as Internet accessibility and full cooperation from the students were more challenging and the actual learning engagement for the receiving end appears to be compromised due to some teachers who were inadequately trained for online instruction. (Abstract by authors

Similar words, different meanings: a natural semantic metalanguage exploration of cultural differences

Anna Wierbicka and other writers of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) often argue that anthropologists and psychologists, particularly Western ones, are wrong for applying concepts like mind, anger and depression to foreign cultures because these cultures do not have words with similar intention and extensions. Their critics on the other hand argue that the NSM critique is unjustified because while other cultures do not necessarily have similar words, they must have corresponding concepts simply because people in these other cultures, like in Malaysia, experience feelings like these (M, Immler 1991:51). This paper intends to show that the NSM critique is justified because these corresponding concepts can be similar to a certain extent but can also carry great semantic difference when broken down to their more basic elements of meaning. More importantly, this will be done using analysis of the Malay language