With a growing emphasis on students' ability to assess their own written works in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) writing courses, self-assessment checklists are today regarded as useful tools. These checklists can help learners diagnose their own weaknesses and improve their writing performance. This necessitates development of checklists that guide the learners in assessing their own writing. In this study, a self-assessment checklist was developed for undergraduate students in an ESL context to help them with their argumentative essays. This paper presents the related literature and theories, based on which the checklist was developed. The checklist is described and its potential theoretical and practical implications in ESL writing classes are discussed. Further research is necessary to refine the checklist through focus group studies with lecturers and students.

Academically speaking, for many years humour has been studied in the spheres of philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology and even the neurosciences. In its role, humour allows the speaker to represent a parallel reality, which often induces positive feedback such as laughter, smiles and grins from his/her fellow listeners. This gender study of humour, analyses the roles and functions as well as the similarities and differences of humour found in the recorded discourses of Malaysian males and females. Whilst males and females tend to share similar topics (such as sex), the data shows that both genders approach them in different ways. That is to say, males tend to be more direct as opposed to females.

Previous studies (e. g. Macionis 2001 and Gilleard and Higgs 2000) have shown that the elderly are frequently subject to ageism (a form of social stratification which discriminates groups of people by their ages) in industrialised societies.