Is writing a thinking process? Writers are expected to apply information they already know to gather materials suitable for their essays. They have to use declarative knowledge to practise the skills of analysing information, and synthesising information. Next the writers need to use procedural knowledge to make decisions about downloading the content of the essay. However, not all materials gathered are suitable for their essay. They also need to use metacognition to evaluate information to make the materials work best for their writing task. This qualitative study explores the connection between critical thinking skills and the writing process. Open-ended responses from 20 postgraduate students who attended research writing courses were analysed based on categories of critical thinking skills used in their writing process. The findings reveal interesting implications for learning and teaching academic writing to postgraduate students. The significance of this study is two-fold. Firstly, findings in this study will reveal how writing mirrors the thinking process. Secondly, the results of this study will encourage writing teachers to focus on the learners' thinking process as much as their writing process in the teaching of writing.

Listening skills should be given more attention as listening takes precedence over anything else when it comes to acquiring a language (Putriani, Sukirlan & Supriyadi, 2013). Even with the booming of various technology to facilitate teaching and learning of listening skills in class, the assessment conducted to identify students’ level of understanding of certain topic is still not up-to-date and not parallel with the advancement of technology. The current studies show that the use of mobile apps for listening purpose is proven to be effective in reducing students’ anxiety (Rahimi & Soleymani, 2015), sustaining students’ motivation (Read & Kukulska-Hulme, 2015), and improving students’ linguistic competencies (Ramos & Valderruten, 2017). This study is aimed to test the effectiveness of mobile application in assessing students’ listening skills. Diploma students from various faculties in UiTM Shah Alam were randomly chosen to answer listening comprehension questions via the prototype developed, named Pocket E-Li. The results demonstrate that the majority of the students provided positive response towards the implementation of mobile application for listening assessment. Almost all respondents agreed that listening assessment should be conducted via mobile application in the future. It can be concluded that listening assessment via mobile application is beneficial to students since it meets the students’ demands and needs which is equivalent with the use of current technology.

This paper reports on a study on Experiential meaning particularly the main process types used in the reporting of the airstrike event launched by Malaysian security forces on March 5, 2013 during the intrusion of “Sulu Sultan” followers in Lahad Datu. Data for the study comprised text reports pertinent to the airstrike event published in four different English newspapers which are The News Straits Times (NST), The Star (TS), The Philippine Daily Inquirer (TPDI) and The Philippine Star (TPS). A total of 8 texts were analysed. Various methods have been developed to study newspapers representation and stance of controversial issues which include content analysis, critical discourse analysis, lexical cohesion, the use of metaphors, transitivity and thematic analysis among others. However, the framework of transitivity has not been widely used. Hence, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), in particular, the System of Transitivity propounded by M.A.K. Halliday (1994) was used to bridge the gap in research and the methodology of text analysis was deployed. The study revealed that NST was the only newspaper which highlighted the sorrow and the grief of Malaysians and its Prime Minister in which this newspaper accounts for the most in employing the Mental Processes, while TS, TPDI and TPS highlighted more on the physical actions and the resoluteness of both countries in handling the Lahad Datu conflict when Material Processes were dominant in these newspapers.