This study discusses the industrial training programme at the University of Malaya in Malaysia, specifically the issues that need to be addressed in order to enhance the employability skills of graduates. Findings from the feedback obtained from trainees and organizations in the 2008/2009 academic session were examined in terms of the extent to which trainees felt they were prepared for their training, and the extent to which the tasks given to them during their training were appropriate. Further, trainees' self-rating of particular skills and industry's rating of the trainees were also examined. The feedback is discussed in the context of the need to equip graduates with employability skills, an issue facing Higher Education Providers worldwide. The findings indicate that most of the students were prepared to face the world of work. However, there were several issues which needed attention. These included the need to address the possible mismatch between the tasks assigned to trainees and their areas of study, and the need to enhance English language competency and particular soft skills throughout their degree programme. Continuous input from industry is also necessary to ensure that the training benefits all parties and contributes to the employability skills of trainees.

This article provides an analysis of two colonial reports, the Barnes and the Fenn-Wu Reports on education in the British colony of Malaya. The popular stance on the Barnes and the Fenn-Wu Reports is that one is an effect or reply to the other. We argue on the contrary that the two reports construct a common argument on nation-building which becomes apparent through a dialogic reading of the reports. We show how the two reports, written in the 1950s, reflect the anxiety of the colonial rulers in constructing a nation and the ethnic communities (the Malays and the Chinese) in pre-independent Malaya. These communities were constructed not without their inherent antagonism as well as their reciprocal vulnerabilities in a future political state. This act of articulation is predominantly a political act constructed through a complex web of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. The spectres of the Barnes and the Fenn-Wu Reports continue to surface in education and nation-building discourse in modern-day Malaysia.

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The representation of a religio-political identity by the 'civil society' of a country is a complex act intersecting multiple spheres such as the sociocultural, economic, and particularly partisan understanding of religion, politics, and culture dividing the society (and media houses) who inflect, invent, and articulate novel identity for the people of the republic. This study is about how the discursive field of 'Islamic militancy' is constructed in Bangladeshi news (print) media. The researchers analyzed 21 texts of editorials published in the month of December 2005 in six Bangladeshi newspapers (in Bangla and English). The analysis has been done following a hermeneutic interpretivist perspective, widely practised in discourse analytical studies. With the rise of militant Islam the faceless militants get their pictures published, and their names appear in national dailies Ϫ either through complete or vague identification of doers. The analysis shows that most of the editors produced a secular democratic response to the actions perpetrated by the militants. However, their attempt to occupy the contents of the empty signifier of Islam is heavily inflected by their religious predilections; hence, the fight perhaps is never going to be in favor of the secular-democratic politics that the editors aim to support.