savoy093

In Malaysia, Mandarin has also become a favourite third language subject among university students. However, many non-native speakers of Mandarin often encounter problems in pronunciation. Identifying the pronunciation errors is essential to avoid misunderstanding and communication breakdown. This study aims to investigate the perspective view of factors causing undesirable pronunciation problems faced by the students as non-native speakers based on the phonetic system of Hanyu Pinyin. A survey was conducted by distributing questionnaires to undergraduates from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Engineering Campus to identify the underlying factors of pronunciation problems in Mandarin. The findings from the data analysis show that mother tongue interference was the main problem since some consonants and vowels are missing from the students’ first language. Besides, other factors such as time constraint, psychological problems, and learning environment were among the distracting factors. ...

Web-based instruction (WBI) has been proposed by Mah and Khor (2015) as a supplementary instructional tool to tackle the writing problems faced by Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) students besides to fulfil the writing needs of UiTM learners and instructors due to the limitations found in the existing web-based writing systems. Hence, the objective of this study is to select an appropriate English course by conducting a critical review of literature based on the past studies involving UiTM English courses as well as the types of English courses offered by UiTM before embracing WBI as the course’s supplementary instructional tool. After scrutinising all the UiTM English courses offered in 2013, BEL422 Report Writing was identified as the most proper course to be integrated with WBI owing to its syllabus, course structure, and assessment components that focus on proposal and report writing as the main learning outcome. Through the integration of WBI for instructional purpose, students wh...