Journal Articles by Kim Hua Tan
Binomials or word pairs can present themselves differently in languages and cultures and this may... more Binomials or word pairs can present themselves differently in languages and cultures and this may result in difficulty in learning and teaching a foreign language. Binomials are formed both linguistically and non-linguistically. A thorough study indicates there are many factors involved in the ordering of words in a pair. The ordering preferences can range from the frequency of words, to semantic features, and to phonological principles. In addition, the significant role of gender should not be downplayed in arranging the components of a binomial. This study has taken advantage of a self-designed questionnaire to support the findings. The participants, aged 18-20, included 179 Iranian i.e. 95 male and 84 female undergraduate students who were asked to read a short paragraph about a couple and choose names not only for the couple but also for their siblings and children. In addition, in some cases, the respondents had to write names for some characters in the made-up story and determine what type of responsibility the children of the family should take up. The results of the study indicated that in addition to the phonological rules which greatly contributed to the precedency of a certain word in a nominal pair, there were other factors that could determine which element should stand first. These parameters are further discussed in the article. The findings of this research can target language teachers in general and English-Persian language teachers/ learners in particular. Curriculum designers and lexicographers can also benefit from the findings when designing course materials and writing dictionaries, respectively. ABSTRAK Binomial atau perkataan berpasang boleh dizahirkan dalam pelbagai cara bergantung kepada bahasa dan budaya. Perbezaan ini mungkin menjadi salah satu halangan dalam pengajaran dan pembelajaran bahasa asing. Binomial boleh terbentuk secara linguistik dan sebaliknya. Kajian menyeluruh telah menunjukkan bahawa terdapat banyak faktor yang mempengaruhi susun atur setiap pasang binomial. Keutamaan susun atur boleh ditentukan berdasarkan kekerapan frekuensi, semantik dan prinsip-prinsip fonologi. Selain itu, peranan jantina tidak patut dipandang remeh dalam menentukan susun atur komponen binomial. Kajian ini telah menggunakan soal selidik bagi menyokong dapatan kajian. 179 orang responden terdiri daripada pelajar sarjanamuda warganegara Iran berumur dalam lingkungan 18-20 tahun. Mereka terbahagi kepada 95 orang lelaki dan 84 orang wanita. Mereka telah diminta untuk membaca satu perenggan pendek (cerita rekaan) mengenai satu pasangan dan kemudian telah diminta untuk menamakan pasangan tersebut, adik-beradik, dan anak-anak mereka. Sebahagian responden juga diminta untuk menulis nama bagi sebahagian karakter dalam cerita rekaan itu dan seterusnya menetapkan peranan yang akan dimainkan oleh anak-anak pasangan tersebut. Hasil kajian mendapati bahawa terdapat faktor lain yang boleh menentukan susun atur elemen binomial selain peraturan fonologi yang merupakan penentu utama. Parameter-parameter ini dibincangkan lebih lanjut dalam artikel. Dapatan kajian ini boleh membantu guru bahasa secara amnya serta guru dan pelajar Parsi khususnya. Para ahli leksikografi dan penggubal kurikulum juga turut mendapat manafaat dalam aktiviti pengkamusan dan penulisan bahan kursus daripada hasil dapatan ini. Kata kunci: binomial; budaya; teori 'markedness'; bahasa Parsi; kata berpasang
This study employs a corpus-based method in analysing the noun and noun premodification in journa... more This study employs a corpus-based method in analysing the noun and noun premodification in journal articles relevant to the field of International Business Management. Following the frequency-based tradition, the noun and noun premodification are identified and extracted by using the node-and-collocate approach. The corpus is divided into five sub-corpora for the purpose of analysing the noun collocations and noun premodification types in each section and between different sections in the journal articles, namely, Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results and Discussion sections. The findings show that general adjective is the most common noun premodifier, followed by noun premodifier in both the Introduction and Literature Review sections, whereas general adjective and noun premodifier are both commonly used as premodifiers for nouns in Methods and Results sections. Besides, the general adjective is the most dominant premodifier in Discussion section. The findings also indicate that ed-participial and ing-participial premodifiers are not commonly used in the relevant journal articles. With regard to the use of noun premodification types between different sections in journal articles, general adjective+noun collocation is more pervasive in Introduction, Literature Review and Discussion sections. On the other hand, noun+noun collocation is more commonly found in Methods and Results sections. Following Hoey's Lexical Priming, the results show that priming occurs at grammatical level within the discourse. The noun collocations identified are compiled for the possible use in the English for Academic Purposes Course.
This study is an attempt to identify criteria for newsworthiness in Malaysian sports newspapers. ... more This study is an attempt to identify criteria for newsworthiness in Malaysian sports newspapers. It also seeks to find out how the media shapes the perception of Malaysians through sports news stories. Employing a corpus-based approach, with The Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and Malaysian English Sports News Corpus, the researchers of the study conducted a thematic analysis to look for recurring patterns that would detect the criteria for newsworthiness in the headlines and content of the corpus. It was found that football dominates the pages of the newspaper, and negativity, reference to elite people and nations are the most prominent news values. The patterns of language reveal a very negative sports world in which achievement and winning are stressed at all cost. Players and coaches are pressured to do well or they risk losing their jobs. Scandals are running rampant in the sports world as cases of corruption, drug abuse and bad behaviors among athletes and coaches are consistently reported in the news. Following McKane's (2014) categorization of newsworthiness criteria, and using snowballing sampling method, 85 UKM students were asked to show their criteria for newsworthiness on a questionnaire, which resulted in a mismatch between the news stories and the readers' expectations.
The study examines and compares the use of preposition-related collocations in the writing of Mal... more The study examines and compares the use of preposition-related collocations in the writing of Malaysian learners of English and British native speakers of English. The study seeks to answer two research questions: firstly, it sets out to quantify preposition-related collocation use among the Malaysian learners of English and British native speakers of English by measuring the statistical significance of the relevant collocation use in each group using Mutual Information (MI) and a t-score; and secondly, the study aims to identify types of collocational errors associated with prepositions studied in the current research. The frequency-based approach was adopted in the study to define collocations, with the nodeand-collocates analysis employed to identify relevant preposition-related collocations. Two references were used to determine the acceptability or otherwise of the collocations: Google Internet search engine results and the online BNCweb corpus. The data revealed that Malaysian learners of English produce more preposition-related collocations than British native speakers of English do. In terms of collocational errors, a stark contrast in the writing of Malaysian learners of English and that of British native speakers of English is apparent, in which preposition-related collocational errors in the Malaysian learner corpus constitute 1% to 7% for certain prepositions, whereas British native speakers' writing was found to be totally free of collocational errors. .
Although English and Persian share a basic structure in the formation of passive with the help of... more Although English and Persian share a basic structure in the formation of passive with the help of past participle of the main verb accompanied by " be " in English and " shodan " (i.e. become) in Persian on a syntactic basis, Persian resorts to morphological alternation, too. However, the verb shodan is not merely an auxiliary verb; it can serve as a main verb as well. In fact, Persian passives have various overlapping realizations, bearing the meaning of " possibility " and " going " , too. This study also sought out to investigate whether or not passives differed in written texts. In addition to library resources, the study made use of a comparative text analysis approach to investigate the application of passive structures in the novel Animal Farm (Orwell, 1956) and its Persian translation (Akhondi, 2004). The results revealed that the conventional function defined for Persian shodan as an auxiliary verb for passive structure outnumbers the passive verbs used in the original novel. Findings also indicate that passive voice is not limited to one form of shodan and past participle; in fact, transitivity alternation plays a key role, too. In addition, the combination of shodan with nouns or adjectives is twofold: it can produce both active and passive voice structures. This study was targeted at EFL learners and teachers as well as translators who will duly be provided with fundamental awareness when dealing with English and Persian in learning / teaching process and translating from English into Persian and vice versa.
This study explored the challenges faced by instructors in integrating pragmatics instruction in ... more This study explored the challenges faced by instructors in integrating pragmatics instruction in their language classes. The participants of the study comprised 20 EFL Iranian instructors. Semi-structured interviews were used as the instrument for data collection and the data were analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis. Some pertinent and important challenges emerged from the data. Learners' lack of cultural literacy, lack of instructional media facilities, instructors' low implicit and explicit pragmatics knowledge and insufficient time in implementing the language syllabus were some. Other factors included the high volume of textbooks and lack of materials or input in teacher's guidebooks, which contributes to lack or ignorance of interlanguage pragmatics instruction among instructors. The implication of the findings is that it is necessary to include pragmatics information in instructor's guides, thereby enabling the teaching and dissemination of explicit information in relation to pragmatics issues in the language classroom. Instructors should be given sufficient input in guides and relevant materials to facilitate the teaching of this significant construct so that learners can acquire intercultural communicative competence and due emphasis can be given to pragmatics in teacher training courses.
This study evaluated Iranian intermediate EFL learners' knowledge of interlanguage pragmatic lear... more This study evaluated Iranian intermediate EFL learners' knowledge of interlanguage pragmatic learning outcomes through the production of the speech acts of apology, request, and refusal. The study drew upon the conceptualization of Austin (1962) speech act theory and politeness theory as the theoretical framework of this study. The participants of the study included 235 EFL intermediate learners.
This study examines the effects of formal input exposure and the onset age of exposure on the per... more This study examines the effects of formal input exposure and the onset age of exposure on the performance of eleven different morphosyntactic structures in a foreign language setting. It studies whether being exposed to longer hours of formal language classes at a younger age is advantageous for Iranian EFL learners. Some studies have claimed that there is no advantage for early starters and in the field of grammatical learning, later starters perform better. Four groups of Iranian learners with different formal learning times participated in this study: Groups A and B were public and private school students, respectively, whereas Groups C and D had extra supplementary classes at language institutes as well. A Grammaticality Judgement Task (GJT) including some grammatical structures which were claimed to be problematic for EFL learners, was used as a tool to determine the possible differences in the performance of grammatical structures of the four groups. A two-way ANCOVA and a one-way ANOVA were used to analyse the data. Results suggest that long hours of formal exposure lead to better grammatical performance and the participants who started learning English at age 9 or below performed better in the GJT.
The manner temperaments manifested with the semantic domain of eating and food in a certain cultu... more The manner temperaments manifested with the semantic domain of eating and food in a certain culture can be understood through a discussion of dietetic and culinary concepts of a particular culture. What people in a society and culture eat or like to eat may become an evaluation of their emotional temperaments and therefore an implication for portrayal of their specific cultural models. Calling into question the strong claims of 'embodiment' as an underlying motivation for emerging specific metaphorical concepts by Conceptual Metaphor Theory , the close investigation of metaphorical uses of food-related concepts in Persian manifests that, in spite of some correspondences to those in English, ANGER metaphorical concepts are distinctive. The conceptual metaphor disparities highlight many vestiges of Galenic Theory, and Iranian Traditional Medicine Theory, suggesting that the cultural model of humoralism and dietetics have mingled in Persians' life style. This is because their effects have been extended into Persian metaphoric language, and cognitive conceptualisations of ANGER emotion.
It is widely acknowledged that the main thrust of second language (L2) teaching and learning is e... more It is widely acknowledged that the main thrust of second language (L2) teaching and learning is establishing and developing the communicative competence of learners. Especially, in recent years, the focus has shifted more towards intercultural communicative competence (ICC). As such, it is more practical that educational endeavors should be directed both towards the grammar or lexis of the target language as well as the appropriate use of these grammatical and lexical systems in a variety of situations by considering different social and contextual factors. Therefore, this study embarks on the effect of explicit instruction of formulaic politeness strategies among Malaysian undergraduates in making request. Sixty Malaysian undergraduates participated in the study. The students included two groups of intervention and control groups. The data were cumulated through three tests, namely open ended completion test, a listening test and an acceptability judgment test. Treatment or experimental group received explicit instruction with structured and problem-solving and input tasks. The comparison was made between the performance of treatment group and that of control in terms of the pre-test and post-test. The findings show that the treatment group outperformed significantly than the control group. This matter is suggestive that in this probe, explicit form-based instruction was successful for learners to comprehend and produce the English politeness strategies effectively in making request. The findings of this study will be beneficial for material developers and teachers to make use of form-focused strategies more effectively to teach second language pragmatic features to Malaysian students.
This paper presents the findings of a study aiming to investigate the effectiveness of help-devic... more This paper presents the findings of a study aiming to investigate the effectiveness of help-devices in learners' deciphering of meaning of English words among 232 Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) undergraduates in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). It focuses on investigating the learners' perspectives on dictionary use including their awareness and realization of the importance of using dictionary to look up the most appropriate meaning of multi-sense words. It also examines the effective role the meaning access device like menu system plays in helping learners easily look up the appropriate sense of a multi-sense-word in English. To collect the required data, the study made use of a questionnaire and two Word Sense Identification Tests (WoSIT). Findings indicated that the participants seemed to be less aware of the importance of meaning access devices in deciphering the meanings of words in English. It was also found that the use of menu as meaning access devices is useful in helping the participants look up the most appropriate meaning of a multi-sense word in English.
What people in a society and culture eat or the way they consume their food may become a source d... more What people in a society and culture eat or the way they consume their food may become a source domain for emotional temperament and therefore an implication for portrayal of their specific cultural models. Adopting the basic assumptions of the Lakoffian School on 'experiential realism' and 'universal embodiment' this study is an attempt to delve into the conceptual system of Persian in order to explore its specific socio-cultural motivations for the construction and semantic changes in the use of metaphorical concepts of SADNESS. The metaphorical uses of foodrelated concepts in Persian manifest that, in spite of some correspondences to those in English, SADNESS metaphorical concepts are distinctive in Persian. The conceptual metaphor variations reveal many vestiges of Hippocratic notions of humoral doctrine and Avicennian Traditional Medicine, suggesting that the cultural models of humoralism and dietetics have left their traces deeply in the Persians' belief systems. The effects, therefore, have been extended into Persian metaphoric language.
1 Bridging Theories and Practice through Research: The Malaysian experience TAN KIM HUA NOR FARIZ... more 1 Bridging Theories and Practice through Research: The Malaysian experience TAN KIM HUA NOR FARIZA MOHD. NOR
This study investigated how and when oral communication strategies are used in group discussions ... more This study investigated how and when oral communication strategies are used in group discussions by international students at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, a public university in Malaysia. It aims to examine the differences in the use of communication strategies between high and low proficient speakers. The participants were a group of ten low proficient Arabic speakers of English and a group of ten high proficient Chinese and Arabic speakers of English. Data elicited from audio recordings of oral group discussions and a self-report questionnaire was used to identify communication strategies used. The findings showed that the subjects resorted to ten out of the twelve types of communication strategies specified by Tarone (1980), Faerch and Kasper (1983), and Willems (1987). The most frequently employed communication strategy was code switching; an interlingual strategy and the least used strategy was word coinage; an intralingual strategy. Further investigation indicated that different levels of oral proficiency influenced the use of communication strategies from two aspects. They are the frequency of use and the selection of types of communication strategies. This implies that international students studying at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) need to be made aware of the use of communication strategies depending on their level of proficiency and the fact that raising the awareness of both low proficient and also high proficient speakers to strategies that are used by speakers of different proficiency levels may well help ease communication.
This study describes and compares the gratitude strategies utilized by Iranian EFL and Malaysian ... more This study describes and compares the gratitude strategies utilized by Iranian EFL and Malaysian ESL learners in facing different situations. Data were cumulated from 20 Iranian and 20 Malaysian postgraduate university students having the same language proficiency through a Discourse Completion Tasks Questionnaire. Social status, size of imposition and gender are contextual and social variables which were investigated for two groups of learners in this study. Results of the study illustrated certain commonalities and differentials in terms of the strategies and type of gratitude used by Iranian and Malaysian students. A detailed analysis of the use of the gratitude strategies revealed significant differences in communicative ways of Iranian and Malaysian postgraduate students reflecting insights into understanding the differences in cultural values and norms in two non-western cultures. The results also illustrated that the two contextual factors and gender affect significantly on the type and frequency of the strategies.
Students at higher education are frequently required to write essays and project paper. In fact, ... more Students at higher education are frequently required to write essays and project paper. In fact, writing is very much integral to the students' learning experience in higher education. Writing essays trains students into the expectations of the discipline, and how to present their thoughts and reflection to their lecturers. Research into students' writing at university has shown that the experience of writing not only helps students to become familiar with the standards and style of written expression expected in their disciplines, but it also helps them to clarify their understanding of the subject matter about which they are writing. This study examines the written work of five postgraduate students from the Middle East. The data collection procedures involved analysis of the students' written work and interviews. The present study used several taxanomies of ESL writing strategies in order to investigate and understand the students' conceptualization of their writing tasks. The findings revealed that the students employed several composing writing strategies in order to help them work with, think about and manipulate the materials required in order to do the writing task. The writing process was also interactive, which means that the students used and build upon their previous knowledge, skills and strategies in writing. The present study ends with the suggestion that students' attention must be directed to the foundations of writing a project paper in order that they have a greater sense of audience's awareness, in addition to increasing their knowledge on discourse conventions of academic writing.
Ezafe, as an indispensable phoneme of the Persian language, does not exist visually, but its pres... more Ezafe, as an indispensable phoneme of the Persian language, does not exist visually, but its presence is extremely effective. It is an enclitic usually realized by /-e / or /-ye/ and mostly suffixed to nouns. The presence of the Ezafe is a must when a noun is modified. Ezafe can show different relations like possession and addition. It assumes such roles as definite and indefinite articles, the verb "be", and stands for certain English prepositions. The presence of the Ezafe in Persian can lead to fluency and correct comprehension. No transitive verbs followed by objects can do without the Ezafe enclitic. This paper classifies different phonological and syntactic uses of the Ezafe, discussing its application against the English syntactic positions of words. The paper exhibits the probability of committing mistakes by the Iranian English learners when the Ezafe enclitic is included in or excluded from their foreign language communication.
In this paper, we adopt the framework of Cognitive Grammar developed by to provide a unified acco... more In this paper, we adopt the framework of Cognitive Grammar developed by to provide a unified account of the different senses of the Arabic preposition (fii) as used in the Taizzi dialect, one of the dialects spoken in Yemen. The use of (fii) in the Taizzi dialect differs from its use in other dialects of Arabic or even Standard Arabic. That is, (fii) is cognitively characterized differently in the Taizzi dialect from (fii) in other Arabic dialects or (fii) in Standard Arabic. It remains a fact that despite the number of studies that dealt with prepositions, in general; prepositions received little attention and semantic analyses of prepositions remain inadequate . With regard to prepositions of Arabic, the main problem with the previous studies that dealt with them, in general, is that they examined them from a grammatical point of view focusing on their functions rather than their meanings. Moreover, these studies dealt with prepositions as used in Standard Arabic and were basically established upon the views of old Arab grammarians. The data presented and analyzed in this paper show that speakers of the Taizzi dialect developed the use of (fii) and extended its semantics to cover cognitive domains different from its use in Standard Arabic or other dialects of Arabic. However, what proves to be true about the use of (fii) in the Taizzi dialect need not necessarily be so about other dialects of Arabic. This reflects the cultural variance of prepositional usage in the Taizzi dialect in particular and other dialects of Arabic in general. The paper demonstrates that though speakers of the Taizzi dialect use (fii) in cognitive domains different from its use in Standard Arabic they still cognitively characterize the relation holding between the Trajector (TR) and the Landmark (LM) as a containment relation.
This paper discusses the significance of learning and teaching culture as an inseparable part of ... more This paper discusses the significance of learning and teaching culture as an inseparable part of language and invites language teachers to integrate cultural points into the syllabus of language programs. A learner may have a good command of grammar and lexicon, but have difficulty in comprehending the message. Understanding why communication is possible for certain readers but not for others can partly lie in the cultural shades of the words and events. For some nationalities, gestures, names, numbers, and colors are suggestive of ill manners, while in others, they are welcome. This study justifies the importance of including culture in the language teaching programs because familiarity with the cultural features of the target language people can help the learners see the world with open eyes and modify their attitude toward other cultures. This can generally enhance their tolerance not only as a language learner but also as a human being.
This paper compares several types of verbs in English and Persian in terms of direction. The dire... more This paper compares several types of verbs in English and Persian in terms of direction. The direction of verbs seems to be potentially problematic for the Iranian EFL learners. English verbs can be formed by affixation and compounding. Even proper names and names of animals and products can be used as simple verbs. Persian is poor in this respect, and most verbs are formed via a limited number of affixes or by the productive process of verb collocation. English verbs seem more flexible in switching to intransitive or transitive modes, while Persian requires morphological transformation. The use of prepositions with objects can pose problems for the Iranian EFL learners. In one language, the focus of the sentence is on the subject while in the other, emphasis is directed to the object. Adverbs and prepositional phrases can be inherently stored in the English verb, while Persian has to openly express them.
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Journal Articles by Kim Hua Tan