This paper discusses the speech acts in Facebook Status Updates posted by an apostate of Islam. The Facebook Timeline was observed for a duration of two years (January 2015 to December 2016). More than 4000 postings were made in the data collection period. However, only 648 postings are related to apostasy. The data were classified according to the types of speech acts. Expressive speech act is the most frequent speech act (33%, n=215), followed by the directive (27%, n=177), assertive (22%, n=141), and commissive (18%, n=115), respectively. Based on the speech acts used, it is discernible that the apostate attempts to engage other Facebook users and persuade them into accepting her ideology while gaining their support. This paper is novel in the sense that it puts forth the social actions of an apostate which is very scarce in literature. It is also methodologically innovative as it uses social media postings as a tool to explore the apostate’s social actions in an online space.

This paper reviews the strategies and challenges for professional development of Malaysian teachers. In relation to the government's effort to improve teacher professional development, many English as a second language (ESL) teachers register themselves to the 'Teacher's First-Degree Programme' organized by the Ministry of Education. The participants of the programme, somehow, face a number of challenges. The main challenge is the adult ESL teachers need to follow in doing the degree part time as all of them are full time teachers and teaching in different schools located at different districts across the state. The challenges reviewed in this paper may be relevant to administrative decisions concerning education policies and goals intended to prepare TESL professionals. Finally, it may also provide insights into EFL program administrators who are intending to foster greater levels of commitment and permanence of faculty members through a more holistic understanding of their teachers' needs and barriers in involving in professional development.

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One of the components of learning English is Grammar, and the intrinsic part of it is Parts of Speech (PoS), where the majority of Malaysian students in higher institutions are still grappling to understand its use in sentences. This study aims to compare conventional method to e-learning method on its effectiveness in the teaching and learning of PoS. The application of Stanford PoS tagging has been used to analyze the PoS in every single word of the sentences extracted from the articles in The New Straits Times Online (NST Online). This quantitative research study adopted a comparative analysis in analyzing its findings. The results were statistically analyzed using The Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) for statistical analysis. These findings of the research reveal a significance difference between the score from students using E-paper and the score from students not using E-paper in learning Grammar. Independent t-test was carried out to compare mean between the two groups. The result shows a significance difference (p-value = 0.007, t = -2.774) between the two groups of students’ score. The mean performance of the students using E-paper shows a higher percentage compared to those not using E-paper. As students nowadays spend most of their time with electronic gadgets, this is an innovative way to capture their interest to spend more time on quality reading materials via electronic newspaper, simultaneously learning Grammar by going to the crux of its core by identifying the PoS of each word in sentences using new pedagogical strategy of PoS tagging.

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