Search

Although there are several studies conducted by linguistics researchers on the differences between the linguistic styles of female and male writers, there are not many studies conducted on the use of boosters in academic writing. Boosters are used to convince and emphasize statements made. This study analyzes the regularity of boosters used in the Introduction section of Ten Research Articles (RAs). The influence of gender differences in the use of specific boosters will also be looked at. A document analysis method was chosen as the 10 RAs were analyzed as the corpus in this study. The findings showed that male writers used more boosters than female writers. Even though the number of words for the female writers was more than the male writers, it did not affect the number of boosters used in the Introduction section of those articles. In conclusion, it can be deduced from the analysis that both the female and male writers used boosters to highlight their claims or their beliefs regardless of their gender, while the use of boosters was more evident among the male RAs as the male writers seemed to be more direct in illustrating and mentioning their claims.

This research is to discover whether lecturers' beliefs coincide with their practices in their daily teaching. The focus will be on the belief in the use of code-switching in the classroom. At the same time, it is also worthwhile to indicate whether there are differences in the beliefs between the lecturers and the students. For that purpose three lecturers from an engineering department of a polytechnic in a northern region as well as the students in the classrooms were chosen to participate in this research. The methods designed include classroom observations, questionnaires for both the lecturers and students, and interviews with the lecturers after the classroom observation. The findings showed that the lecturers mostly used reiteration and message qualification functions when code-switching. They believed that it was intended mainly to enhance their students' understanding and to save their time from lengthy explanation whenever the students are in doubt. This was agreeable by most students as they believed that code-switching could help them understand the lessons better. Some recommendations are made based on the findings and analysis of the results, expecting that it would further improve the teaching of Mathematics, Science and technical subjects in the Malaysian polytechnics.