No abstract

Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) will benefit the national economy. Therefore, educators and school community have given appropriate attention to students that are competitive to fulfill the industrial economy needs. This research studied the nurturing of attitude towards STEM among students in developing interest in STEM careers by using the survey method. Research objective to determine direct influence between attitude towards STEM and development of STEM career interest among Form Four science stream students. A total of 398 Form 4 students from the science stream in secondary school in Selangor, Malaysia have been chosen as respondents. The Student Attitudes questionnaire toward Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (S-STEM) and interest in STEM career is used to study the influence of attitude towards STEM in developing STEM career aspiration among science stream students. Result of the study shows that the students attitude in developing STEM career recorded the value p =.002 and is significant with the value of p < 0.05. Besides, the effect of influence for the three attitude sub-constructs towards STEM which are science (0.65), technology & engineering (0.65) and mathematics (0.59) recorded the value of more than 0.3 which give a huge impact of research. Thus, the nurturing of attitude towards STEM among students provide a new dimension in the learning process for future need compared to considering it as a study requirement only for academic purpose.

Education system plays an important role when it is able to produce skilled labour in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics field (STEM) for industrial need. Increasing students' interest to explore science by integrating STEM in the learning process is the main agenda for the global education system to ensure the learning outcome for students to excel in the future is achieved. Therefore, the need to cultivate the attitude towards STEM and the motivation to learn science is the drive in the development of students' STEM career interest. Hence, this research will 1) Identify the direct effect of attitude towards STEM and 2) Identify the effect of mediator which is motivation to learn science towards the development of students' STEM career interest. This research is a quantitative research that uses questionnaire forms. The research respondents are comprised of 419 Form 4 science stream students in Selangor, Malaysia. The result from the study can answer the research questions by proving the influence of attitude towards STEM is significant (p=.002) and the huge effect of motivation in science as mediator (R2=.458) towards the development of students' STEM career interest. The result of the study is hoped to be able to give meaningful input towards students' learning as well as the importance of attitude towards STEM, and the motivation to learn science as a mediator could contribute towards detailed curriculum design and the teaching of science so that it will become more meaningful towards students' future.

This article presents the findings of a corpus based research that investigated Malaysian ESL learners' use of modals in two written tasks. The aim of the study was to investigate the distribution and functions of modals used in the students' writing. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis supplemented with some descriptive statistics derived from a concordancer which identified modals used by the students at two different levels. The findings showed that the preferred modals for the two levels are modals can, will and could which were used to express ability and certainty. Modals of probability/possibility showed lower frequencies of use in the writing. Also, students at the lower level were less competent in using past form modals as compared to those at the higher level. This study indicates that the students were able to perceive the conceptual meaning of each modal and their communicative function.

This case study explores the students' willingness to communicate in Mandarin language. The learning of Mandarin as foreign language (FL) in Kolej Profesional MARA (KPM) Beranang has started since 2013. However, there have been some issues on students' willingness to communicate using Mandarin especially on students' reluctance to use the targeted language. Therefore, this research was aimed to explore students' willingness to communicate using Mandarin language in KPM Beranang. The research used a qualitative approach and the main data for the study was semi-structured interviews and observations. The researcher used Atlas.ti version 8.0 to analyze the data. The research findings showed that students' willingness to communicate by using Mandarin was only limited to greeting their teachers. It was found that students were not willing to use Mandarin in voicing out their opinions during the teaching and learning processes, not to mention when they are outside of the classroom context. The students did not have the confidence to use the targeted language and were not willing to communicate with strangers.