Language use as audience design: The dichotomy of language choice in content-based classrooms in a Malaysian university / Kamisah Ariffin, Norzie Diana Baharum & Rahimah Abd Wahab

The language policy in UniversitiTeknologi MARA (UiTM) clearly stipulates that English should be used as the medium of instruction in all programmes taught (Surat PekelilingTNC[100-UiTM (TNC(A) 1/1, 7 May 2003). However, it has been observed that such language policy cannot oversimplify the complexities of the actual language use in the (at least) bilingual context of interaction in the classroom. This paper sets to present and discuss the extensive use of both BM and English in the formal classroom setting in Universiti Teknologi MARA despite the stipulated language policy. The data were represented by the discourse of content-based classroom sessions. The findings suggest language choice was highly governed by the social and psychological variables of the speakers. This paper, however, only focuses on speakers’ language choice and use as audience design in the context of interaction. Using Bell’s (1984; 2001) audience design model as a framework, the data indicate that the impact of the audience on the speakers’ speech style depends on how they ratify and accommodate the audience in terms of their norms of interaction, competence, linguistic awareness and accommodation of the audience’s needs. In addition, speakers’ style-shifting in response to topic(s) is also due to the association of topics with the audience. This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the sociolinguistic phenomena in real communication, by providing real examples from a situated discourse. The findings have shown that the regulation of the institutional language policy has oversimplified the complexities of the actual language use in a bilingual/multilingual context of interaction

The use of weasel words as disclaimers in superiority claims / Kamisah Ariffin...[et. al.]

Issues reported in the news regarding the false claims of products, particularly beauty and health products, suggest that consumers may have been misled and deceived by the claims made by the advertisements on the products. Data from a study on the print advertisements on the local complementary and alternative medicines in Malaysia show that the most frequently used technique in claiming the superiority of these products is the use of weasel words. These words are able to make the products more appealing to the consumers. However, consumers may not realize that weasel words are empty words that function as modifiers to qualify the claim. In fact, the words are cleverly used to negate the claim or as disclaimers to the claim. This paper focuses on the use of these words in advertisements in the local CAM print advertisements in Malaysia with the aim of educating consumers of the advertisers’ trick of the trade. Using Mallery’s framework of the types of weasel words (words of action, words of comparison, words of possibility, and words of illusion of strength), the analysis indicates the presence of 527 weasel words in the 157 advertisements examined, with the action words being the most commonly used. The analysis also reveals that the highest number of weasel words is found in the biology-based products, followed by the energy-based products, whole medical systems and body-based practices. It is hoped that by recognizing the types of weasel word and how it functions in a claim, consumers may be more discerning in evaluating the claim of the product

Preliminary analysis of Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MaCFE)

This paper presents the findings of the preliminary analysis conducted on the Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MaCFE). MaCFE is a specialised corpus consisting of written documents compiled from banks in Malaysia and the corpus is currently housing approximately 4.3 million word tokens. The aim of the analysis was to evaluate the suitability of the texts chosen to represent the financial domain. The preliminary analysis involved generating the word list and lists of co-occurrences from MaCFE. RapidMiner Studio Educational 7.5.001 and an in-house Java programming solution was utilised to perform the analysis. The word list and lists of 50 most frequent two-word and three-word co-occurrences generated from the analysis reveal that the text compilation is representative of the financial domain in Malaysia. The study concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings

The development of Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MaCFE)

This paper presents the processes involved in the design and development of the Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MaCFE); a specialized corpus containing a wide range of online/internet documents (i.e. communiqué) from various financial institutions in Malaysia. It describes in detail the processes involved in the collection and selection of data and preprocessing of raw data, which includes data digitizing, cleansing and tagging. This paper also introduces the user interface for MaCFE with its built-in linguistic analysis features. MaCFE was designed and developed with the intention of providing corpus linguistic researchers with the avenue to explore the field and for ESP/EAP practitioners in Malaysia, as the resources for the development of local-based ESP/EAP curriculum and teaching and learning materials. It would also serve as a learning avenue for future financial professionals in their training. MaCFE corpus has approximately 4.3 million words from 1472 electronic documents retrieved from banks and financial institutions’ official websites. At present, users can make queries to the MaCFE database using its built-in concordancer. In the future, its language-data-processing facilities will be expanded to include tools for keyword, wordlist and word collocations queries