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English language proficiency is the main goal of any learner of a language. Speaking and listening are major components of key skills and literacy qualifications. We need listening skills to understand and to be understood. It has become one of the most important factors of success and excellence for students who wish to speak, understand, advance their career path or continue their education abroad. When students listen to the English language, they face a lot of listening difficulties. This paper examines the teaching of listening comprehension at Misurata preparatory schools. It investigates the challenges that students face in learning listening comprehension skills. Students move to secondary education without a suitable foundation for listening comprehension skills. For this reason, the present study attempts to investigate some listening hindrances faced by students at preparatory schools to elicit their views about listening comprehension skills. This study reports the factors that the students believed had influenced their listening comprehension skills at Misurata preparatory schools. It is an effort to generate awareness among teachers, educators, language policymakers, and learners of English about the proper implementation of this important receptive skill. Data was gathered through a questionnaire from the students' responses. A qualitative method was adopted to analyze the obtained data. This study revealed that listening comprehension is hindered by: limited knowledge of words, accents, phonological difficulties, speech rate, insufficient practice of listening skills in the classroom, inadequate time to teach listening skills, and students are not encouraged to listen to programs outside the classroom.

Drawing on interviews with parents of indigenous communities, this article presents insights into indigenous parenting aspects related to inside-and-outside classroom learning, cross-cultural complexities, and literacy practices by taking perspectives of Malaysia’s indigenous parents as an example. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological model on how individuals navigate complex interactions in a particular society, indigenous parents' authority and agency play important roles in navigating competing issues of indigenous learners' literacy, learning, and class. Implications on parenting practices, particularly on uplifting indigenous parents with sociocultural, learning, and literacy engagement within changing and challenging expectations of indigenous learners inside and outside their homes, are presented.

In 2020 the world was shaken by COVID-19 pandemic that technically changed the way the world works in almost all domains from business, governance, education, and lifestyles. As the pandemic spreads globally, with little signs for improvement, the world has made adjustments to live with the virus. The education sector suddenly shifted from face-to-face and blended learning classes to full online class. This paper explores the experiences of several tertiary students’ online learning experiences with two objectives: discovering their initial expectations towards online learning as well as investigating the challenges encountered by the students in online learning. The research design of the current study is a case study involving seven tertiary students who were enrolled in English language degree in a public university in Malaysia. Data were collected through essay and semi-structured interviews. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, all interviews were conducted using several online platforms. Data was then analysed using a thematic analysis using qualitative data analysis software; Atlas-ti. The findings show that the students had a positive presumption about online learning initially but was struck with the harsh realities of online learning afterwards. Among the challenges they faced were lack of physical touch, solitary learning, and issues with technological aspects. The findings are crucial to understand the obstacles faced by our learners in grasping with online learning, and with this understanding several practical steps can be taken to overcome the said issues.

Examining the linguistic representation of a minority group using computer-assisted method is the heart of this study. In particular, we are interested in investigating how the indigenous people of Malaysia or Orang Asli are being represented by the news media in Malaysia as we believe that mass media play a huge role in curating the image of a group and affecting perception of readers about that group. It affects how they are perceived by the mainstream community. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, a 700,000-word corpus was examined focusing on grammatical words. Through the analysis, we found that the Orang Asli are consistently being framed as a helpless group who are frequently in need of assistance. Often, they are positioned as passive recipients of things from more dominant groups like volunteers and governments. These consistent negative and helpless images of the Orang Asli, we believe will be detrimental to the overall perception of society towards them which may later affect their social standing in the Malaysian community. We believe that stories about orang Asli need to be curated in a more positive manner thus, promoting them as active members of the society who can contribute to the development of the nation.

Demands for a greater number of preachers or Da’ies who are capable in delivering the Islamic teachings clearly and confidently are anticipated to increase. Besides knowledge on Islam and its teachings that they possess, these Da’ies are expected to have a good command of English language to convey the Islamic teachings to a wider global audience. Malaysia has many capable Da’ies who can disseminate Islam in the Malay language but many lack the ability to communicate well in English. Ignoring this problem will produce incompetent Da’ies who may miss critical issues, resulting in lost knowledge, and inadept understanding of Islam. Thus, it is vital for these Da’ies to have the ability to translate Islamic terms, concepts and worldview correctly, to ensure better coverage of da’wah. The objective of this paper is to investigate students’ English proficiency by looking at their ability to translate. This paper examines the translation competence of 71 students from various faculties from a Malaysian Islamic-based public university. A test was used as the research instrument which was later examined via document analysis approach. Students were asked to translate basic Islamic religious terms and the translated work were marked based on a set of acceptable answers determined by the researchers. Findings indicate that their translation competencies are influenced by three elements: language, textual/subject and cultural competences. However, the participants have poor translation qualities indicating lack of translation abilities. Future recommendations regarding translation competencies, and Islamic religious terms translation issues are discussed.

By taking Malaysia as a case in point, this paper explores ideological constructions regarding the position of the English language that are created as a result of collisions between prioritizing nationalist and realizing globalization agendas. Through a discourse analysis of newspaper texts across two of Malaysia’s press, The Star and New Straits Times, the discussion will show how these newspaper items represent certain world-views on ‘measures’ of the standardization of the English language. It is argued that they illuminate some of the many issues that stage dialogues between local/global continuities and disjunctures on how English language ‘should’ be positioned within the changing and challenging landscape of multilingualism and ‘global English.’ This article also attempts to extend the debate further to show examples of postcolonial ‘revisions’ to displace these points, highlighting alternative voices to articulate colonial ‘visions’ of the globalization of English.

Objective - This article attempts to discuss an on-going sexual harassment deterrent initiative in safeguarding the well-being of sports practitioners in Malaysia. Methodology/Technique – The primary data used in this article is taken from a focus group session which consisted of a total of 35 participants. The main objective of this article is to discuss the results, specifically the recommendations made by focus group participants which consisted of government officers, members of NGOs, sports experts, and sports practitioners. The focus group participants firstly pin-pointed the inadequacy of current deterrent mechanisms that have failed to protect Malaysian athletes from sexual harassment such that more often than not many cases have been unreported or have simply been dismissed altogether. Following this, suggestions and recommendations were put forward by the focus group participants to improve on the mechanisms that would ensure a safe and supportive environment for all Malaysians in sport in order to eliminate all forms of sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation. Finding – Taking into consideration the suggestions and recommendations put forth by the focus group this paper suggests a 4Ps framework in order to eliminate all forms of sexual harassment and abuse in sport. Type of Paper: Empirical. JEL Classification: I310, Z32, Z280. Keywords: Safeguard; Well-being; Sports Practitioners; Sexual Harassment; Deterrent Mechanism Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Syahirah, S; Fathynah, S; Hamid, B.A; Ismail, H; Puteh, F. (2021). Sexual Harassment Deterrent Mechanism to Safeguard the Well-Being of Sports Practitioners, GATR Global J. Bus. Soc. Sci. Review, 9(1): 50 – 57. https://doi.org/10.35609/gjbssr.2021.9.1(6)

Orang Asli is a group of indigenous people who live according to a set of lifestyle and belief system and speak the native language. Previous studies have found that the Orang Asli are mostly depicted in the news media as backwards and dependent on others (Marlina Jamal & Shakila Abdul Manan, 2016). Such stereotypical depiction is shared with other research undertaken in various countries, particularly those in Canada or Australia. While many of these studies analysed findings from the media and communication or socio-cultural perspectives, the present study examines the representation of Orang Asli in Malaysian news/media by focusing on the use of language, i.e. linguistic viewpoint. The examination undertaken in this study focuses on headlines and lead paragraphs of one of the most influential English language newspapers in Malaysia. This study demonstrates the synergy of two methodological approaches in linguistics namely critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Our main findings show how Orang Asli is consistently depicted around stereotypical news narratives such as issues of land rights and other resources. We also found that the voices of Orang Asli leaders are overshadowed by other authorities such as the state government. Thus, this study contributes to shed light on the linguistics resources and language patterns used to portray the Orang Asli in Malaysian newspapers. Keywords: Orang Asli; news discourse; corpus linguistics; critical discourse analysis; indigenous people

Rohingya refugees are a group of people who does not only have well-founded fear that they cannot return home, but are afraid of challenges awaiting them in the host country. Due to their traumatic past experiences, the Rohingya refugees rely much on their own community specifically the community leaders for assistance. However, the lack of community leaders as well as deficient hierarchical engagement with the leaders have created more difficulties for the refugees to seek for help. Social navigation for survival becomes an issue not only because they have language barriers but also internal conflicts on the imagined terrains (the hopes) and the unexpected circumstances (the difficulties) they encounter in the host country. This study aims to develop a literacy training module for Rohingya youth refugees to become social navigators. These refugees are expected to provide horizontal (peer-like) engagement to their community. To meet the aim of the study, 15 Rohingya youth refugees were recruited using a snowball sampling technique. Both qualitative and quantitative data collection instruments were used: guided questionnaires, interviews and baseline tests. The themes from the data suggest that despite the challenges in language, the participants exhibited strong sense of brotherhood with other fellow refugees. Religion has developed a powerful bond that ignites their willingness to extend assistance to their community. However, the participants unfolded their uncertainties on the ways and resources available, to be of help. It is also apparent that, a conceptual framework suitable for this literacy training module for social navigation emerged from the overall data. The framework will serve as a guide to develop a Literacy Module to groom social navigators to help their people, the Rohingya refugees.

In adult refugees’ context, functional literacy is the biggest barrier for the refugees to socially navigate in the host community. Functional literacy is ‘the level of skill in listening, speaking, reading and writing that any individual needs in order to cope with adult life.’ Without functional literacy abilities in the language/s of the host country and uncertainties in the journey to resettlement, the refugees tend to become very vulnerable and traumatized. Thus, social navigation for survival becomes an issue not only because they have language barriers but also internal conflicts on the terrains of the imagined (the hopes) and the unexpected (the difficulties) they encounter in the host country. Employing both qualitative and quantitative data collection tools, this study explored the current English language literacy ability of the Rohingya youth refugees and related challenges. Findings revealed that despite the keen interests the participants have in acquiring English language proficiency, the different alphabetical systems pose problems for them. Despite the challenges in language, the participants exhibited strong sense of brotherhood with other fellow refugees and willingness to extend assistance. Religion developed the powerful bond. Based on the empirical data gathered, a Functional Literacy Course was developed to address language issues embedded with Leadership as well as Islamic Psycho-spiritual elements.

The role and position of the English language within the higher education has increasingly plays a significant role as the leading language of academic publications, technologies as well as communication. The higher institutions in the country hold important responsibilities to educate and produce the younger generation of Malaysians as potential human resources that not only fulfil the needs of the local and international workforce in the attempt to achieve the national’s aspiration of a developed country. This study seeks to understand the undergraduate students’ English language literacies in relation to the demand of the literacy practices and competencies needed at the tertiary level. The literacy practices in this instance include academic literacies that encompasses not only knowledge of discrete language skills and appropriate language use in context, but it is to be holistically understood to include also competence in reading and writing. Subsequently, data were collected via questionnaires and focus groups with selected undergraduate from various disciplines to investigate whether their educational and environmental factors influence their existing level of English language competencies.. Findings of the study provides in-depth insights of the challenges faced, and the language literacy practices needed in meeting the expectations of potential employers of the required English language skills to be used at workplace. Peranan dan kedudukan Bahasa Inggeris di peringkat pengajian tinggi semakin meningkat kepentingannya dan telah menjadi antara bahasa utama didalam penerbitan ilmiah, bidang teknologi serta komunikasi. Institusi pengajian tinggi di negara ini memegang tanggungjawab yang utama didalam mendidik dan melahirkan generasi muda warga Malaysia yang berpontensi bagi memenuhi keperluan tenaga kerja yang berkemahiran tinggi di peringkat tempatan dan antarabangsa didalam usaha negara ini mencapai inspirasinya sebagai negara yang membangun. Kajian ini dijalankan untuk memahami keperluan penguasaan amalan literasi dan kecekapan Bahasa Inggeris yang diperlukan oleh pelajar di peringkat Sarjana Muda. Amalan-amalan literasi yang dimaksudkan merujuk kepada penguasaan literasi akademik yang merangkumi bukan saja pengetahuan kemahiran berbahasa serta penggunaan bahasa yang sesuai didalam konteks, malahan juga kecekapan didalam aspek membaca dan menulis. Oleh itu, dapatan data dilakukan melalui kaedah soal selidik secara bersasar kepada sekumpulan pelajar sarjana muda yang berlatar belakangkan pelbagai bidang di dalam mengenalpasti samada pengaruh persekitaran akademik mereka mempengaruhi tahap penguasaan Bahasa Inggeris sedia ada mereka. Hasil kajian memberikan gambaran yang jelas berkaitan cabaran serta amalan literasi bahasa yang diperlukan oleh pelajar sarjana muda didalam memenuhi tahap penguasaan bahasa Inggeris yang diharapkan oleh bakal majikan mereka berkaitan kemahiran Bahasa Inggeris yang diperlukan untuk digunakan di tempat kerja.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) era brings with it exciting new possibilities and at the same time new challenges for the language and education sector. Due to the exponential changes brought about by the 4IR, researchers predicted that pretty soon, we will witness changes in most sectors in the world including the employment sector. Over the years, the delivery of Malaysian Higher Education Programmes (MyHE) has transformed significantly. The challenges and the way forward towards addressing the issues pertaining to 4IR in the realm of language and education are presented and discussed in this editorial.

This paper analyzes traces of masculinity by examining Malaysian sports news, centralizing the discussion on emotions in sports news discourse. Specifically, it compares the depictions of m...

This article attempts to discuss the challenges related to the occurrence of sexual harassment in sports. There were many glaring cases of sexual harassment in sports reported in the media. Unfortunately, most of these cases end up without any redress for the victim or punishment against the perpetrator. Hence, the objective of this article is to analyse the challenges faced by sports practitioners and officers in preventing as well as handling a few recent cases of sexual harassment and abuse. A qualitative method has been applied and the primary data is collected through focus group sessions comprised of thirty-five (35) experts from sports institutions, enforcement officers, civil society representatives, athletes and related government agencies. The result depicts there are fifteen challenges involved in handling cases related to sexual harassment and abuse in sports particularly lack code of practice and unclear procedures on the person in charge. Since there is no specific rules related to sexual harassment, previous cases were investigated under penal code and made it impossible for the victims to receive protection and redress.

This paper investigates the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the way English language teaching (ELT) is currently understood and practised in Mal...

One way to minimizing resource requirements is through the careful management and allocation, in example, scheduling. Research on weakly hard real-time scheduling on multiprocessor has been extremely limited; most prior research on real-time scheduling on weakly hard real-time has been confined to uniprocessors. The need for multiprocessor is due to issues that impose limits on the performance of a single processor. As real-time application systems increasingly come to be implemented upon multiprocessor environments, thus, this study applies multiprocessor scheduling approach for verification of weakly hard real-time tasks and to guaranteeing the timing requirements of the tasks. In fact, within the multiprocessor, the task allocation and migration problems seem even harder than in uniprocessor case; thus, in order to cater that problem, the sufficient and efficient scheduling algorithm supported by accurate schedulability analysis technique is present to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees. The proposed approach involves the two existing multiprocessor real-time scheduling algorithms combining with the hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and μ-pattern. In this paper, the Matlab simulation tool is used in order to validate the result of analysis. From the experimental and performance evaluation results, it proved that the proposed approach is satisfied the tasks deadlines with less number of misses.

There are two major strategies to schedule real-time tasks in multiprocessor systems; partitioning and global scheduling. The partitioning approach has acceptable overhead but cannot guarantee to be optimal. The global approach can provide this guarantee but it has considerable overhead. Thus, a multiprocessor real-time scheduling approach for weakly hard real-time tasks is proposed that employs hybrid scheduling. Studies have shown that current multiprocessor scheduling of weakly hard real-time tasks used imprecise computation model based on iterative algorithms. This algorithm decomposed into two parts; mandatory and optional, unfortunately, the result analysis is precise only if its mandatory and optional parts are both executed. Even, the use of hierarchical scheduling algorithm, such as two-level scheduling under PFair algorithm may cause high overhead due to frequent preemptions and migrations. In this paper, an alternative scheduling approach will be proposed, which is, its combines elements of the two well-known multiprocessor scheduling approaches. It aims to employs benefits and advantages of the partitioning and global scheduling. Accordingly, the proposed hybrid multiprocessor real-time scheduling is use the best algorithm of each of partitioning and global approaches, R-BOUND-MP-NFRNS and RM-US (m/3m−2) with multiprocessor response time test. Schedulability experiments and simulation results using Matlab show the proposed hybrid multiprocessor scheduling approach to be effective for weakly hard real-time tasks.

Real-time tasks can be classified into three categories, based on the “seriousness” of deadline misses - hard, soft and weakly hard real-time tasks. The consequences of a deadline miss of a hard real-time task cannot be accepted whereas soft real-time tasks tolerate “some” deadline misses. While, in a weakly hard real-time task, the distribution of its met and missed deadlines is stated and specified precisely. Due to the complexity and significantly increased functionality in system computation, attention has been given to multiprocessor scheduling, comprised of several processors. Due to the fact that in multiprocessor, there have more than one processor, algorithms which can cater higher computational complexity for task allocation and for task migration are highly required. Thus, the sufficient and efficient scheduling algorithm supported by accurate schedulability analysis technique is presented to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees. In this paper, a schedulability analysis to schedule weakly hard real-time tasks has been proposed by using the global multiprocessor scheduling technique, called multiprocessor response time analysis combining with the exact analysis, named hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and μ-pattern under static priority scheduling. Then, the Matlab simulation tool is used in order to validate the result of analysis. From the performance evaluation results, it proved that the proposed approach is satisfied the tasks deadlines with less number of misses.

Real-time systems or tasks can be classified into three categories, based on the “seriousness” of deadline misses – hard, soft and weakly hard real-time tasks. The consequences of a deadline miss of a hard real-time task can be prohibitively expensive because all the tasks must meet their deadlines whereas soft real-time tasks tolerate “some” deadline misses. Meanwhile, in a weakly hard real-time task, the distribution of its met and missed deadlines is stated and specified precisely. As real-time application systems increasingly come to be implemented upon multiprocessor environments, thus, this study applies multiprocessor scheduling approach for verification of weakly hard real-time tasks and to guaranteeing the timing requirements of the tasks. In fact, within the multiprocessor, the task allocation problem seem even harder than in uniprocessor case; thus, in order to cater that problem, the sufficient and efficient scheduling algorithm supported by accurate schedulability analysis technique is present to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees. In this paper, a weakly hard scheduling approach has been proposed and schedulability analysis of proposed approach consists of the partitioned multiprocessor scheduling techniques with solutions for the bin-packing problem, called R-BOUND-MP-NFRNS (R-BOUND-MP with next-fit-ring noscaling) combining with the exact analysis, named hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and µ-pattern under static priority scheduling. Then, Matlab simulation tool is used in order to validate the result of analysis. From the evaluation results, it can be proven that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches in terms of satisfaction of the tasks deadlines.

The importance of missing a deadline is one of the classifications of a real-time tasks or systems. A weakly hard real-time system is a new generation for a real-time system in which some degree of missed or losses deadlines are tolerated occasionally but the missing of deadlines has to be stated precisely. For a traditional real-time system, timing requirements in hard real-time are very restrictive, must meet all the tasks deadlines. Meanwhile, in soft real-time timing requirements, the requirements are too relaxed because there are no guarantees can be given for the deadline, whether it is met or missed. As a systems demand complex and significantly increased functionality, multiprocessor scheduling has been given attention and taken into consideration. In fact, within the multiprocessor, the predictability problems seem even harder. Thus, in order to deal with the problem, the partitioned multiprocessor scheduling techniques with solutions for the bin-packing problem, named R- BOUND-MP-NFRNS (R-BOUND-MP with next-fit-ring noscaling) combining with the exact analysis, called hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and µ- pattern are present to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees under static priority scheduling algorithm. We prove that the proposed approach provides predictable weakly hard real-time tasks through validation and simulation results.