Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide new environment for learning and teaching. Today, apart from a fully face-to-face or online environment, blended learning promises opportunities for teaching and learning to be done in both environments. This paper reports results from an analysis of data collected from students at a Malaysian university. An end-of-semester survey was completed by 40 students taking a Public Speaking course. The survey was conducted to understand students' reactions towards the use of wiki in a blended learning environment. The survey data are being used to inform decisions on the course delivery structure and about adoption of new digital technologies for learning and teaching. Findings from the study indicate that the students found that using wiki facilitated their speech preparation process specifically in receiving feedback and improving speech delivery. Although some had reservation about publishing their speeches publicly on wiki, they understood that it was to their benefit. Therefore using wiki in a blended learning environment was found to be advantageous to the Public Speaking course.
Listening anxiety is said to have a direct effect on listeners’ abilities to comprehend what has been said. This is often because listeners are concerned that the message is so complex that they will not be able to understand what they are listening to. In relevance to listening tests, students’ listening anxiety may prove to be a variable that could affect their listening test scores especially for second language (L2) learners. This preliminary study was carried out, as a part of a bigger experimental study to investigate if L2 students experienced listening anxiety. The Foreign Language Learning Survey (FLLAS) (Kim, 2000) was used as the main data collection instrument. The survey comprised of 33 items, which was tested for reliability in this study (Cronbach Alpha α = .928). Eighty-three (n = 83) undergraduate students from one of the universities in Malaysia participated in the survey. The findings of the survey indicated that the students have a rather high level of listening anxiety. This paper elaborates on areas in which students were most anxious about while listening, which may have some implications on the teaching of listening specifically listening comprehension to L2 students.
The rapid growth on ICT have reshaped our live today, and nowadays' university students in Higher Learning Institutions have an immense use of mobile phones, iPads and other portable devices. Mobile learning or m-Learning focuses on the mobility of the learner while interacting with portable technologies. The use of mobile learning among university students is seen as an alternative to increase their interest and motivation on learning the academic programmes at Higher Learning Institution. The m-learners use mobile device for educational purpose at their own time convenience. An online questionnaire survey will be used to collect data for this study. The findings will reveal on the students" readiness which are basic readiness, skills readiness, psychological readiness and budget readiness at a public university in Malaysia in relation to mobile learning. The study will also explore the students" motivation towards the use of mobile technologies for learning English in the university. A discussion on the implications of the findings will also be presented. Contribution/ Originality: The paper"s primary contribution is finding that the respondents were prepared for the integration of m-learning in UTHM and were motivated to participate in m-learning for English course in the university. Thus, more studies on m-learning perception and motivation should be piloted to other universities" staff and educators in Malaysia. (Rahamat et al., 2017). Moreover, the rapid growth on ICT have reshaped our live today, and nowadays' university students have an immense use of mobile phones, iPads and other portable devices. All these smart phones and other portable devices are equipped or ready for social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram, which are part of what is known as Social Web 2.0, best characterized by the notions of social interaction, content sharing, and collective intelligence (Alabdulkareem, 2015). Thus, the use of appropriate materials and tools in the teaching and learning is definitely helpful in making the process more meaningful (Rahamat et al., 2017).
The teaching of literature component in the English language classroom heavily relies on the traditional methods like "tell them and test them"[1]. Recent development and advancement of technology have called for a transformation in the literature classroom through the incorporation of internet technologies and applications with emphasis on self-directed learning by means of online discussion and negotiation. Thus, this study aims to explore the potential of technology integration in the literature classroom through the utilization of an online discussion platform. The objective is to examine its impact on students' test performance of William Golding's “Lord of the Flies”. This quasi-experimental study was conducted at a university in Iraq and forty-five undergraduate students enrolled in an English language course participated. The students were assigned to groups of four members and collaborated on Facebook Messenger as the online discussion platform for five weeks on various aspects of the novel. Scores from students English literature pre- and post-tests were analyzed descriptively and also using a paired sample t-test. Results revealed that there was a statistically significant increase in the students’ pre and post-test scores. This indicates that the use of online discussions to understand and learn various elements of the literary text was significantly impactful and the approach is recommended for the literature classroom to help improve the students' responses to the text and test performance.
This paper reports on a study investigating the effects of teaching academic text cohesive devices on ESL students' listening comprehension. The main objective of the study was to find out if through teaching cohesive devices would enhance students' prior knowledge and subsequently result in increased listening comprehension. Based on a pre-test post-test research design, 40 students enrolled in English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Malaysia were engaged as participants. A listening comprehension test was conducted prior to and post-intervention. The intervention consisted of lessons on academic text cohesive devices. The data were then analysed and reported using descriptive statistics and paired samples t-test. From the findings, it was clear that there was an increase in the minimum and maximum scores as well as in the mean scores between the pre-and post-test scores. More importantly, there was evidently a significant improvement in the participants' post-test listening comprehension scores as compared to the pre-test scores. In sum, the teaching of academic text cohesive devices does have a significant impact on ESL learners' listening comprehension. Hence, two recommendations for the teaching of listening to ESL learners are: one; to recognize the place of prior knowledge in enhancing comprehension and two; to facilitate listening comprehension through appropriate pre-, while-and post-listening activities.
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