Instructional leadership and instructor development: a case study of Malaysia’s research universities

Universities are affected by internal factors such as when certain self-imposed procedures complicate the delivery of teaching and learning and thus depriving students and lecturers of needed creativity, flexibility, and time to optimize meaningful learning. A lack of systematic succession planning in academic leadership may also detract from maintaining continuity in the teaching and learning of related policies and practices. All these factors contribute to the need to reconceptualize university teaching and learning. This study provided an in-depth look at the practices of instructional leadership in Malaysian research universities. Primary data were gathered from thematic in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that the research universities planned sustained programmes of educational development , adopted principles of effective learning and teaching, and designed conducive learning environments for students. Academics need a supportive culture to put these principles into practice. Finally, creating a learning culture depended not only on well-educated, well-meaning individual academics but also an academic community working together to create a student-centered attitude

Examining the impact of using social networks on political knowledge and political attitude by Iranian university students

Social Network Sites (SNSs) play key role to raise individuals’ awareness in terms of political issues around the world. Young generation particularly university students utilize social networks for political activism and discussion. The present study investigates the effect of social network on political knowledge and attitude of Iranian university students. Mixed- method design was employed to collect quantitative data through a questionnaire followed by an emailed interview with Iranian media experts. The sample size in the study consisted of 382 Iranian students and 12 media experts. The findings of the current study showed that there is generally a direct and positive relation between the level of use of social networks and political knowledge, and attitude. Moreover, the results revealed that using social network sites have a significant positive effect on student’s level of political knowledge and political knowledge mediates the positive effect of social network use by Iranian university students on their political behavior. The results of interview corroborate that easy access to modern information sources has increased political knowledge of the students. The results also implied the necessity of deploying an intelligent filtering rather than indiscriminate blocking of the social network websites

Online corpus tools in scholarly writing: a case of EFL postgraduate student

Some studies have reported the positive outcome of using concordancers and dictionaries in (ESL) context. This study aims to examine how an EFL writer consulted with concordancers and dictionaries along with Google and Google Scholar when engaging in academic writing at university level. The researcher investigated a non-English-major postgraduate student corpus consultation over five months. The researcher provided a toolkit including corpus tools; concordancers, collocation dictionaries, thesaurus, Google, in combination with traditional reference resources such as monolingual and bilingual online dictionaries. The participant received a three-session training to consult with different resources while writing research paper. Real-time data, stimulated recall interview, participants’ writing and query logs served as the main sources of data. Results showed that the participant was aware of the applicability of each corpus tool. He could successfully solve 604 linguistic problems, and promoted his linguistic awareness. It is implied that corpus tools have the potential to assist EFL writers in proofreading and editing the surface levels of their writing

Emotional intelligence and its contribution to language learning

This paper aims to review the significance and importance of emotional intelligence in the process of language teaching and learning. It has been investigated that emotional intelligence plays fundamental role in all aspects of lives; it also has an effective contribution to language teaching and learning, since for learning a language, learners typically need to communicate with people. In domain of language teaching and learning, the concept of emotional intelligence has not broadly identified, applied, or generalized, whereas there are considerable effort s have been made to promote this key concept since two decades ago. To achieve this aim, it is required that researchers and teachers take into account the concept of emotional intelligence and it is required that language teachers promote emotional intelligence in the classroom in order to create efficient and effective learning environment

Perceptions of Challenges in Writing Academically: Iranian Postgraduate Students’ Perspectives

Academic writing skills are essential tools that postgraduate students reading for their doctoral degree have to master to be able to produce dissertations, research reports and academic assignments of quality in the course of their studies; and publish research-based articles in established journals. This paper discusses the perceptions of a group of Iranian postgraduate students pursuing their doctoral degrees at UPM (Universiti Putra Malaysia) on the challenges they face in writing academically. They provided the data for this paper via their responses to a survey.  The findings indicate that these postgraduate students perceived some academic writing skills to be more challenging than the others.  The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of the findings; and recommendations on how the situation can be improved

The effect of explicit training of metacognitive reading strategies on online reading comprehension

Few studies have investigated the detailed procedure of systematically delivering and teaching metacognitive strategies in higher education. This study investigates whether explicit training in metacognitive strategies could improve undergraduates’ online reading comprehension over the pandemic. The results of this study contribute to teacher education programs to teach and apply regularly metacognitive reading strategies. In a quasi-experimental design, the experimental group and control group underwent 14 sessions of training. Semi-structured interviews and a Metacognitive Reading Awareness Strategy Assessment were conducted among experimental students. The data were collected using the reading test, Metacognitive Reading Awareness Strategy inventory, and semi-structured interviews in Malaysia. The results of Repeated Measure ANOVA showed the mean scores of students in the metacognitive group were significantly higher than the mean score of the students in the conventional reading group (F= 1.3,82.3) = 215.973. p <0.001). The results of the Metacognitive Reading Awareness Strategy Assessment showed that students had more awareness of global reading strategies (M= 3.511), followed by supporting reading strategies (M=3.468) and problem-solving strategies (M= 3.427). The thematic analysis result supported that students were moderate users of planning and monitoring strategies while evaluative ones were less frequent. The results also revealed that students perceived that lack of vocabulary knowledge, heavy dependence on their teachers, and lack of strategy training were the main causes of their reading difficulties. The findings implied that EFL teachers should introduce metacognitive reading strategies through appropriate and systematic instructions to enable the students to implement them in their academic reading

Effective academic leadership of learning and teaching in Malaysian higher education

his study provides an in-depth look at the practices of leadership in selected Malaysian Universities that have been identified as academic leadership. The findings of this study support the fundamental elements that have been previously identified by researchers and professional organizations, as academic leadership. Specifically, academic leaders focus on learning and teaching for students in relation to instructor development. This study employs a qualitative research approach. Thematic method was used to analyze the data. Data were collected through in-depth interview. Based on the findings of this study leadership works towards the future of the university through the development and involvement of instructors to facilitate teaching and learning at Malaysian universities. Based on the obtained results, Malaysian universities planned through sustained programs of educational development to use principles of learning and teaching effectively in designing learning environments for students. Secondly, academics need a supportive culture to put these principles into practice. To date creating learning culture depends not only on well-educated, well-meaning individual academics, but also on an academic community working together to create a student-centered attitude

The Effect of Teaching Metacognitive Reading Strategies on the Critical Thinking Skills of Undergraduate Students

Metacognitive strategies have been investigated as facilitating tools for students’ reading comprehension. No studies have investigated the effect of systematic teaching of metacognitive reading strategies on students’ critical thinking skills. The present quasi-experimental study examined the effect of explicit metacognitive strategy instruction and critical thinking skills of ESL international freshman university students. Data were collected from two homogeneous 25-member groups of experimental and control learners randomly assigned to these groups. The experimental group and control group underwent 14 sessions of training. The results related to critical thinking tests revealed the mean scores of students in the metacognitive group were significantly higher than the mean score of the students in the conventional reading group (F= 1.3,82.3) = 215.973. p 0.001). Another interesting finding is that teaching metacognitive reading strategies significantly improved students’ induction (14.72) and credibility (14.30) skills. The findings provide insights for integrating metacognitive reading strategies and critical thinking skills in higher education contexts

International Postgraduate Students’ Perception of Challenges in Academic Writing in Malaysian Public Universities

The purpose of this study is to investigate international postgraduate students’ perceptions of difficulty with academic writing in Malaysian public universities. A survey was used to collect students’ perceptions of difficulties and challenges in general academic writing skills and language-related skills. The results revealed that students perceived greater difficulty in language-related problems than general academic writing skills. In terms of language-related skills, they ranked writing coherent paragraph, summarizing and paraphrasing, applying appropriate lexical phrases, utilizing proper academic language and vocabulary respectively as the most difficult areas in writing. However, with respect to general academic writing skills, they perceived the most difficulties in reviewing and criticizing the literature, writing introduction and research gap. The results of this study implied that international postgraduate students who graduated from non-English medium instruction universities should be supported in terms of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), critical thinking skills and language-related skills to become self-directed in learning to write

Concordancing and writing: review of related literature

In recent years, ESL and some EFL teachers have emphasized student-centered learning and focused on Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) and the use of linguistic corpora through Data-Driven Learning (DDL). Corpus consultation has been integrated into second language writing classrooms for a few decades. Some studies have reported that corpus consultation is useful to some extent. The present study aimed to review the potential of concordancing in L2 writing using existing literature. Therefore, all these empirical studies provide useful information on the impact of corpus concordancing. The results of the review showed that learner would benefit from concordancing as a reference tool if they are trained adequately in corpus consultation. Moreover, it is implied that learner concordancing raised learners’ awareness in linguistics aspects and promote learner autonomy. Future studies are also suggested based on the gap identified in the reviewed studies