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This paper examines middle leadership of the heads of English, maths and science departments in four international secondary schools in Malaysia. It focuses on their roles, responsibilities, role relationships, instructional engagement and leadership involvement within the theoretical framework of instructional, distributed and teacher leadership. The study is a qualitative multi-method case study, involving observation, documentary analysis, and semi-structured interviews with 12 heads of department, 36 teachers, and four principals. With respect to the middle leaders’ roles and responsibilities, the findings illustrate cross-school and in-school differential developments, with contextual factors contributing to uneasy role relationships. The results also show that, while broad-based leadership opportunities are limited for the middle leaders and teachers, the most powerful and common feature of all these international schools is the centrality of teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to focus on relevant issues of entrepreneurship education, such as target groups for the subject. It advocates the need for inclusion of entrepreneurship education as a subject in the curricula of all primary, secondary and tertiary learning institutions in Malaysia and other developing countries. Design/methodology/approach – This paper analyses the current structure of entrepreneurship education at the different educational levels. Findings – Enterprise education should not be equated solely to any specific institutions but throughout all phases of education systems. Practical implications – Entrepreneurship education is reviewed in its totality. This is beneficial to educators and policy-makers that are involved in setting or facilitating entrepreneurship educational programmes. Originality/value – The paper provides an evaluation of the state-of-the-art of entrepreneurship education in Malaysia. The educational institutions will require much restructuring to enhance skill development for entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The democratization of education in Malaysia has come a long way since the early 1960s. In the early 1990s, the government decided to democratize secondary education in order to widen formal access to secondary education, especially at the upper secondary level. It is the contention of this paper that the widening of formal access to education may not lead to real access to education if effective measures are not put in place. It is also the contention of this paper that the democratization of education that leads to the massification of education or mass education should not be at the expense of educational quality and excellence if it wants to have a more significant impact on the actual outcomes of schooling. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part provides the background information on educational expansion that stems from the democratization of secondary education such as enrolment rates, number of schools and teachers as well as organizational adjustments. The second part examines the problems and challenges of the democratization of secondary education in relation to issues such as diverse needs of students, disciplinary problems, school dropouts, urban and rural disparity, preferential policy and educational quality and excellence. All these issues have an impact on the desirable outcomes of the democratization of secondary education as far as real access to education as well as equality and quality of education are concerned. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Among a number of urban adolescents in Malaysia, going online is a much valued practice. They are regularly drawn to the Internet to engage in activities across school, nonschool, mainstream and alternative domains. The aim of this study is to know more about what these adolescents do online. Data on the online activities were collected from 535 adolescents (333 male and 202 female Year 10 students) in five urban secondary schools in Penang, Malaysia. It was found that while English was formally learnt as a second language in school, the percentages of language use on the Internet as indicated by them were: 77.06% in English, 8.16% in Bahasa Malaysia and 14.72% in Chinese. The participants’ Internet activities and popular websites showed their preference for entertainment and social networking. The overall trend was towards using the receptive skills of reading and listening rather than the productive skills of creating written output. Based on the trends observed, the paper concludes with some implications for ESL education, in Malaysia and other similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource-based school projects have good potential to be an effective approach in information literacy instruction (ILI). These projects offer the opportunity for students to engage in information problem-solving learning activities and employ various learning skills, including information literacy (IL). The researchers seek to explore ILI through resource-based projects to shed more light in this area. This paper aims at better understanding the integration of IL through the context of school project work. Adopting a qualitative research approach, the respondents involved in this single case study are three project supervisors/teachers and six 15 years old students who are involved in two project assignments. The study employed semi-structured interviews with the teachers and focus-group interview with the students. Findings of the study show that all teachers interpret IL as ICT skills and admitted to not teaching "IL" during project supervisions. It also reveals that only minimum IL integration took place during project supervision, where only IL elements of lower levels were involved in that integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the discourse of history 'works' in the context of Malaysian junior-secondary education. Using the tools of systemic functional linguistics, a representative selection of school texts is deconstructed. By focusing on the intimate relationship between ideology, context, and text, characteristic purposes and their generic, discourse and lexico-grammatical realizations are identified, described, and interpreted, and comparisons made with the results of Australian studies. The disciplinary purposes of generalization and interpretation are realized in the Malaysian texts through similar genre selections and patterns to those operating in the Australian context. However, the Malaysian discourse avoids the argumentative exposition and high levels of abstraction needed to support the work of interpretation and argumentation. Such differences are motivated by Malaysian ideological and contextual demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English is taught as a second language and compulsory subject in Malaysian secondary schools. Writing is one of the four language skills taught and tested. At the upper secondary school level, students write a variety of text types, most of which conform to examination genres. Given a learning context that is examination-driven and teacher-centred, how do students accomplish their writing tasks in a non-negotiable writing curriculum? Embedding the classroom in a larger social and cultural context, this study demonstrates how some students responded to teacher instructions such as 'read, understand, interpret, do' and 'I want all your papers when the bell rings'. Data were taken from student interviews, teacher interviews, students' written products and classroom observations of writing lessons over the second half of the school year. Findings from the study show that the students' focus on acceptable writing for school and examination purposes did not encourage them to develop their writing skills beyond these requirements, but to adopt a range of pragmatic and expedient tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the notion of schooling and draws on the experiences of Malaysian teenage schoolgirls in contemporary postcolonial Malaysia. Using a critical approach to understandings of schooling, the author unpacks the links between the macro, micro and the personal in examining these girls' negotiations with discourses of schooling. The intra and inter ethnic dynamics between the Malay, Chinese and Indian collectivities problematises the notion of schooling in contemporary Malaysia. The author examines the markers of the discourses of schooling as manifested in the narratives of these girls. These include the pedagogical practices of streaming and ranking the politics of ethnic identification and the 'Chineseness' in the school ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]