Mothers' involvement: Children's perception of maternal childrearing practices

The purpose of this study is to identify maternal childrearing practices (achievement values, monitoring, and discussion) among employed and unemployed Malaysian mothers. Generally, these mothers have similar levels of childrearing practices. They instill high achievement values, conduct consistent monitoring on their children, and carry out regular discussions with them. They only differ in terms of monitoring. Discussion, implications, recommendations, and suggestions for future study are included

Kesediaan pelajar dari aspek kemahiran teknikal terhadap pembentukan kebolehkerjaan di Kolej Vokasional Wilayah Selatan

Graduan yang menganggur terus menjadi masalah yang semakin meruncing di Malaysia. Terdapat majikan yang menganggap kompetensi akademik sahaja tidak mencukupi dan mula meminta institusi pendidikan tinggi untuk menghasilkan graduan yang dilengkapi dengan kemahiran teknikal. Kajian ini merupakan satu kajian untuk mengenalpasti kesediaan pelajar dari aspek kemahiran teknikal terhadap pembentukan kebolehkerjaan di kolej vokasional wilayah selatan. Seramai 113 responden telah dipilih sebagai sampel kajian. Instrumen kajian yang digunakan dalam kajian ini ialah borang soal selidik yang mengandungi 60 item. Kajian rintis dijalankan untuk mendapatkan nilai alpha bagi instrument kajian di mana nilai alpha bagi aspek kemahiran teknikal adalah α = 0.962 dan bagi aspek kebolehkerjaan adalah α = 0.954 . Data yang diperoleh dianalisis dengan menggunakan Statistical Package for Social Science Version 20 (SPSS 20). Analisis deskriptif dalam bentuk skor min digunakan untuk melihat kesediaan pelajar. Hasil kajian mendapati bahawa tahap kesediaan pelajar dari aspek kemahiran teknikal terhadap pembentukan kebolehkerjaan di Kolej Vokasional Kluang, Kolej Vokasional Batu Pahat dan Kolej Vokasional Muar berada pada tahap tinggi. Hasil kajian juga menunjukkan terdapat perbezaan antara jantina pelajar dari aspek kemahiran teknikal yang mempengaruhi kesediaan pelajar terhadap pembentukan kebolehkerjaa

Identifying parenting practices: An initial step in setting up parenting program in school

The purpose of this study was to identify the levels of parenting practices among Malay and Chinese parents as perceived by their children. A total of 217 students responded to a questionnaire with items pertaining to their mothers’ and fathers’ demandingness and responsiveness practices. Findings revealed most of the Malay and Chinese parents in this study were perceived by their children to be low in demandingness and responsiveness. The only difference reported was between mothers’ and fathers’ demandingness. The response to each item in the demandingness and responsiveness measurement would be a guide to what should be included in the parenting course program. Implications for further research were also discussed

BOOK REVIEW OF NICHOLAS SPARKS’ MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

A novel is one of literary works that attract readers of various ages and backgrounds. Novel is a work of fiction, it is a story drawn out of the writer's imagination. Message in a bottle is a famous novel that has one of the international best-selling based on famous author, Nicholas Sparks. The writer believes that this is a great novel to be read. This novel narrates a story of a divorced woman, she found her husband having an affair. Although she is not willing to continue living alone, she still goes on with her job as a columnist, as well as raising her child alone. One day she found a message in a bottle. There, on the paper, written a man's desire for his beloved woman, but the woman has passed away. A further story for this novel in written in the summary and author’s biography

Character Education from the Students’, Teachers’, and Schools’ Perspective

In 2016, the Indonesian Government emphasized character education by sparking a Character Strengthening Program or Program Penguatan Karakter/PPK to build and strengthen the students’ character. This program focuses on character building but it mainly highlights five main good characters which are religiosity, nationalism, integrity, independence, and cooperation. This study aims to deeply understand the perspective of students, teachers, and schools toward knowledge and value of character education and to explore the linkage among them as a complete picture. A mixed-method research was employed in this study. The data was collected from 2 junior and 2 senior high schools, which involved 4 headmasters, 12 teachers, and 212 students. Regression analysis was performed to evaluate the roles of teachers and schools in the internalization of character education among students, while the qualitative approach was employed to understand teachers’ and schools' perspectives. This study finds that based on the students’ perspective, teachers' and schools' roles are playing a significant effect on the internalization of the values of character education to them. The school and the teachers were not familiar with terms used by the governments PPK programs. Despite, the school and teacher are in synergy in developing the students’ good character with their own character development terms such as “akhlaq mulia” which is actually has similar values with the Government’s Character Strengthening Progra

Modified Cloze Test, Essay Test, Personal & Collaborative Writing Tasks in EFL Composition Class at Universitas Andalas

This retrospective study reports a quantitative analysis of two types of assignments and two test forms used to measure improvement of student’s writing skill in two composition classes at Universitas Andalas, West Sumatera, Indonesia. This project aims to identify the different roles of the two test forms used as well as the relationship and learning effects between the two test forms and weekly personal writing task or in-class group tasks. In this research, two EFL classes of Composition with two different groups of students in two successive academic years were observed. The classes’ activities, held through fourteen meetings for learning activities and two meetings for mid-term and end-of-term examinations, consisted of weekly assignments of composing paragraphs or short essays individually and collaboratively. The first composition class used an integrative test, i.e. cloze test, as the mid semester examination and a short essay test as the final semester examination. The second class used only essay test for both exams. The individual weekly writing task was assigned in both classes while the collaborative writing task was assigned only in the first class. The pearson r corelational analyses on scores of the assignments and the tests in both classes shows that the modified cloze test appeared to still correlately weakly with the essay test but, through t-test analyses, still significant in detecting the learning effect. Personal weekly writing assignments correlate strongly with essay test while the collaborative work appeared to have less significant learning effect on the student's writing competence

A Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs

In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation, which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks. Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

HOW READY ‘INDONESIAN ENGLISH’ IS TO LAUNCH: AN EMIC PERSPECTIVE

This is a qualitative study investigating the strength of the proposition of Indonesian English (Indolish) as a potentially emerging English variety from the outer/expanding circle from an emic perspective. This proposed variety does not yet exist even as a de facto English variety spoken in Indonesia or elsewhere. Nonetheless, the growing spread of English used by Indonesians has frequently prompted the idea of promoting the establishment of Indolish as a new English variety in the World Englishes areas for Indonesians. To clarify this early signal, an exploratory study was conducted to investigate the perspective of Indonesian postgraduate students who pursued their higher degrees in some Australian universities and whose overseas learning and language contact experience should bring them into a direct contact with a wide range of English varieties and thereby allowing them to better reflect on the significance of creating a special type of English for Indonesians. Seven participants responded to the three open-questioned survey questionnaire sent to two mailing list groups of Indonesian Postgraduate students. Two participants prefer to have Indolish while five others disagree with the idea. Majority of the participants show a strong nationalistic identity indicating a stagnant foundation process in Schneider’s Dynamic Model  in Indonesian context. Nevertheless, the participants demonstrate a strong dependence on English NS norms which confirm Kachru’s proposition and indicate their rejection of Norton’s notion of ownership of English language. In conclusion, these participants view that Indonesian English does not seem ready to launch yet

Beyond Linguistic Documentation: Between the National Language and Local Languages in Indonesia

This paper discusses the politics of national language policy, especially in Indonesia and the effects of the policy toward the continuity of language diversity in Indonesia. Firstly, a short review of studies in endangered languages is presented in order to fit this discussion in appropriate place in the literature. To get more specific, the Indonesian language policy and its influence toward the country’s linguistic diversity is reviewed which is followed by the description of the media’s influence upon the threat posed to the marginal local languages. After this point, Indonesian linguists’ work will be reviewed in relation to their own status as members of different communities of practice. At the end, recommendations for improving the future linguistic works are suggested in light of language documentation, preservation, and maintenance