In Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, engineering students are expected to deliver technical oral presentations on numerous occasions prior to graduation. These presentations include survey report presentations, laboratory report presentations, project/assignment presentations as well as final year project presentations. Technical presentation refers to a prepared formal presentation on scientific, engineering, technological, business types, regulatory, legal, managerial or social scientific information topics to the non-expert audience (DiSanza and Legge, 2003). Students often struggled when they have to deliver technical oral presentations and most of the time they had difficulty to deliver effective presentations especially for their final year project. This study was conducted to address these issues with the intention of proposing measures to help students deliver effective technical oral presentation. This paper reports on the preliminary findings on; 1) the specific areas of difficulties faced by the students in delivering effective technical oral presentation and, 2) the different ways on improving ineffective technical oral presentation. A set of questionnaire was distributed to 235 students from six different engineering faculties in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Findings indicated that the students encountered problems when delivering technical oral presentations especially in terms of content, delivery and language. They also provided suggestions on how to improve their technical oral presentation skills. It is hoped that the findings can shed some lights where the teaching of technical oral presentation skills to the engineering students is concerned.

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Students of private universities in Bangladesh are often found to be less competent in spoken English. Since the universities have adopted EMI (English medium instruction) policy, the prevailing linguistic condition on the campus is an “English only environment.” In this context, students are required to communicate in English both inside and outside their classroom, but they desperately struggle to cope with this environment. This study attempted to understand and explain this problem; hence, it set three aims: to evaluate students’ current level of proficiency in spoken English, to investigate the reasons, and to offer remedies. Initially, selected students were given an IELTS-style speaking test in order to determine the overall proficiency in spoken English. Then, involving teachers and students, semistructured email interviews were conducted. The findings report that students’ current level of proficiency is around IELTS band score 5. Reasons for low development of spoken English among students include complex nature of speaking, inappropriate application of instructional methods, teachers’ low proficiency in spoken English and controlling behavior, students’ psychological factors, sociocultural factors, students’ inadequate linguistic resources, L1 interference, and large class size. Remedies suggested by the participants entail integrating TBL (task-based learning) and CL (cooperative learning) teaching-learning, making students aware of noticing, learning speaking through listening, teaching collocations, promoting self-regulated learning, and strengthening teacher education. The reasons investigated and the remedies explored have significant implications that might guide the members of the operating trusts of the private universities, members of the curriculum development and revision committees, and the practitioners to adopt practical approaches to ensure effective learning of spoken English by the students.

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is a crucial reference framework for informing teaching, learning and assessment that has achieved worldwide prominence in language education. However, there have been concerns raised regarding the breadth of its influence across different domains and countries. Using a bibliometric approach, a sample of 770 scholarly works on the CEFR publications from the Scopus database was observed to investigate the CEFR research activity. The data was analysed using Microsoft Excel for frequency analysis, VOSviewer for data visualisation, and Harzing's Publish or Perish for citation metrics and analysis.

Background and Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore the metacognitive reading strategies used by low and high proficiency Form Three ESL (English as Second Language) students and highlight suitable strategies that can be exposed to the low proficiency students.   Methodology: To serve the purpose of this research, an explanatory sequential mixed method design was used. As for the sampling, purposive sampling was employed in this study. The respondents were drawn from two Form Three classes in the selected secondary school in Pasir Gudang, Johor, Malaysia. There were twenty-four boys and thirty-six girls. They were all fifteen years old and represented three main ethnic groups which are Malays, Indians and Chinese. The number of respondents was equally the same for both groups; 30 from the low proficiency group and 30 from the high proficiency group.   Findings: The data gathered in this study revealed that the most popular metacognitive reading strategy among the respondents is self-evaluation. In addition, the most significant difference between the high and low proficiency students is that the latter employed fewer metacognitive reading strategies than the former. Furthermore, through the findings, this research also suggested the metacognitive reading strategies suitable for the low proficiency students; advanced organization, selective attention, self-management, directed attention and monitoring.   Contributions: This research aids the teachers in adapting their instructions and putting extra effort into training students, especially low proficiency students, to use suitable metacognitive reading strategies. Keywords: Low proficiency students, high proficiency students, purposive sampling, metacognitive reading strategies, explanatory sequential mixed method design.   Cite as: Jeevaratnam, J. A., & Stapa, M. (2022). Exploring metacognitive reading strategies used by low and high proficiency form three ESL students. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(1), 335-365. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss1pp335-365