Business Negotiation

The article reveals the representation  of the negotiation process as a linguocultural code. It implies the following model comprising as the main elements: the environment of negotiations, its participants, the goals and motives of the negotiation process, the subject and process of negotiations and its results. All those elements are verbalized by different lexical units and structures

*SA means Saudi Arabian *B means British *Decription of the revised categories can be found in Table 2 Note-Not all giving interactions are coded as 'A' and not all asking interactions are coded as 'B' so, please follow Figure 2 during coding.

*SA means Saudi Arabian *B means British *Decription of the revised categories can be found in Table 2 Note-Not all giving interactions are coded as 'A' and not all asking interactions are coded as 'B' so, please follow Figure 2 during coding.

This article examines the effects of negotiation practices, such as coercion and contract formality, on how suppliers and customers perceived the resulting business relationship. We conducted a purchasing negotiation simulation with students in a classroom setting in which participants competed for resources in a mock supply-chain context. The participants were surveyed at key stages of the ongoing negotiation in order to measure their behaviors as a customer-supplier relationship developed. The data were used to test several hypotheses developed from the marketing and purchasing literature. The hypotheses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results demonstrated that the use of coercive techniques by negotiators during negotiation had a negative effect on satisfaction. In addition, the findings showed that, as expected, negotiators entering a negotiation with a cooperative orientation would tend to avoid the use of coercive practices during negotiation. The cooperative orientation also exhibited an unexpected positive effect on the formalization of the design of the contract between the parties. This study contributes to the current knowledge base focusing on the creation of agreements between companies and will, we hope, encourage the integration of suppliers and customers in an operating context within a supply-chain setting.

Culture-based negotiation practices and preferences in business continue to attract the interest of academics and practitioners. Observers, however, have collected little data on Japanese-Japanese interactions. Most research on Japan focuses on Japanese interactions with non-Japanese. That over-focus in addition to the relatively low output of the post-bubble era means that current textbooks, popular business books, and even academic articles often draw on sources that are 20-30 years old. Some behaviors are newly identifi ed by the survey adopted in the present study, such as the frequently observed new value creation. Other behaviors such as emotional displays appear contrary to the expectations of the literature. This quantitative and qualitative survey thus identifi es current Japanese-Japanese intracultural practices in business negotiation and casts light on the differences among participants in negotiation rather than perceiving monolithic teams. The data stem from 80 Japanese managers surveyed on business negotiation practices. This update of the knowledge on Japan will help academics and non-Japanese practitioners better understand and prepare for business in the country.

The subject of negotiation practices and preferences by culture continues to attract academics and business practitioners around the world. In the case of Japan, however, little data has been collected since the Bubble Era. Although Japan, bolstered by Abenomics, is regaining vogue as a place of interest for business as well as academic research, textbooks and academic articles may rely on 20-30 year old data. This research updates the knowledge about intra-cultural business negotiation practices in Japan. As data about Japan, Japanese business practitioners and academics as well as overseas practitioners doing business in Japan and those academics with a focus on Japanese business will be interested. This original research includes quantitative and qualitative inputs of 80 Japanese managers.

Asians are said to use silence in academic situation more than other learners from Europe and America. With the increased need for students' oral participation in the language learning classroom and other academic situations, the Asian silent behavior has been considered a problem. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence by Malaysian science and non-science undergraduate students in academic discourse. Seventeen undergraduate students from a local university in Malaysia participated in a focus group interview which required them to respond to questions related to the beliefs of their culture on the use of silence, the extent to which the participants practice silence in academic discourse, and factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence. There were two groups each from the Departments of English and Computer and Communication System who informed the research. The study was underpinned by Brown and Levinson Politeness Theory, which is tied to the concept of 'face' as something that is highly valuable, and must be guarded in interaction. The findings suggest that some factors such as sociocultural upbringing, personality and intimidation by the environment play a role in the use of silence by the informants of this study.

Communication among students from different nationalities who stay and study in multicultural university campuses is an important issue for their personal and academic lives. Among other concepts of communication, interpersonal communication which requires the direct interactions among communicators is important to be assessed. This study was carried out to assess the characteristics of interpersonal communication among international postgraduate students of a Malaysian public university. This study had 128 participants from 17 different countries, and the quantitative and qualitative methods were applied for the data collection procedure. Based on the results from this study, their stay and study in a multicultural university campus with students from various backgrounds helped the participants to have opportunities to interact with different people, and to gain some new personal and social skills and information. The results from this study confirmed that most of the participants of this study who were from different countries had daily interactions with students from other nationalities, and were comfortable and satisfied when interacting with their international peers. Based on the results, personal skill building was among the main reasons that encouraged the participants to leave their own countries and enroll at a multicultural university abroad. The results from this study may encourage university students to have more interactions with their peers and may also help researchers to focus on the related issues in the future.

The Malaysian context is diverse in that there are three main ethnic and religious groups: Muslim Malay, Chinese Buddhist and Indian Hindus. These ethnic and religious groups are reflected in the staff composition at the University Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), a university on the East Coast of Malaysia. The site has been selected because, given the ethnic mix, there is potential for intercultural communication problems to surface among the staff which includes the three ethnic groups. The objective is to ascertain whether these communication patterns generate problems and conflict which may, in turn, affect the university's productivity.

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in the study of silence as a linguistic tool used by humans for communication purposes. Many past researchers on the use of silence, however, concentrated on studying silence in the classroom context. Few studies, if at all available, are on conversational silence in academic discourse. Still, there is paucity of research on the effect of task types or students’ field of study on the use of conversational silence. This study sought to investigate the perceptions of Malaysian undergraduates on the use of conversational silence in academic discourse. It examined its use by two distinct groups of Malaysian students - science and non-science - in their academic interactions. It also determined the extent to which different academic task types affect the use of conversational silence by the two groups. In addition, it explored how culture plays a role in the use of conversational silence, and identified factors that contribute to...

Asians are said to use silence in academic situation more than other learners from Europe and America. With the increased need for students' oral participation in the language learning classroom and other academic situations, the Asian silent behavior has been considered a problem. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence by Malaysian science and non-science undergraduate students in academic discourse. Seventeen undergraduate students from a local university in Malaysia participated in a focus group interview which required them to respond to questions related to the beliefs of their culture on the use of silence, the extent to which the participants practice silence in academic discourse, and factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence. There were two groups each from the Departments of English and Computer and Communication System who informed the research. The study was underpinned by Brown and Levinson Politeness Theory, which is tied to the concept of 'face' as something that is highly valuable, and must be guarded in interaction. The findings suggest that some factors such as sociocultural upbringing, personality and intimidation by the environment play a role in the use of silence by the informants of this study.

Introduction The emergence of tourism as a new force of change affecting most developing economies has given rise to two sets of concerns: how to control the abrasive consequences of tourism and how to manage the change in such a way that can maximise the benefits to the host ...

Asians are said to use silence in academic situation more than other learners from Europe and America. With the increased need for students' oral participation in the language learning classroom and other academic situations, the Asian silent behavior has been considered a problem. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence by Malaysian science and non-science undergraduate students in academic discourse. Seventeen undergraduate students from a local university in Malaysia participated in a focus group interview which required them to respond to questions related to the beliefs of their culture on the use of silence, the extent to which the participants practice silence in academic discourse, and factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence. There were two groups each from the Departments of English and Computer and Communication System who informed the research. The study was underpinned by Brown and Levinson Politeness Theory, which is tied to the concept of 'face' as something that is highly valuable, and must be guarded in interaction. The findings suggest that some factors such as sociocultural upbringing, personality and intimidation by the environment play a role in the use of silence by the informants of this study.

Malaysia is a nation of 30 million people living in an ethnically and religiously diverse society. Interpersonal arguing, an inherent feature of personal and public experience, seems never to have been previously studied in Malaysia. We did so here and compared results to those obtained in India, China, and the U.S. (where our theories and instruments originated). In Study 1 (N = 230), we found interesting distinctions between Malaysia and the other nations on several measures fundamental to the study of interpersonal arguing. Malaysians had a number of comparatively aggressive impulses, but these were tempered by their higher expectation of civility in arguments and their greater sophistication about the general nature of interpersonal disagreement. Malaysians had positive (not negative) correlations between argument-approach and argument-avoid, and between verbal aggressiveness (prosocial) and verbal aggressiveness (antisocial). Malaysia also produced very few sex differences. In ...

In the field of sociolinguistics, studies of the Japanese language have often highlighted its honorific system, claiming this to be a reflection of a hierarchical society. Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1978, 1987) regarded the unique honorific system as evidence that Japanese is a negative politeness oriented language. Besides being vertically structured, however, Japanese society places great emphasis on group harmony. Consensus within the group overrides any hierarchical differences individuals in the group may have. Such "group first" attitudes may be considered as what Brown and Levinson define as positive politeness, namely, sharing common ground and having camaraderie. We argue that these are indeed manifestations of the less commonly researched phenomenon of positive politeness in Japanese. In this paper, we examine the following five linguistic phenomena in Japanese: 1) Topics, 2) inductive development of talk, 3) co-constructions, 4)backchanelling, 5) pauses. The results of our quantitative and qualitative analyses of the above phenomena suggest that these four features function as positive politeness strategies in Japanese verbal behavior.

The current study addresses the issue of beliefs among UMP international university students towards performing oral presentation in English language. The objective of this study is to identify their beliefs on speaking and performing oral presentation in English as foreign language in order to determine what kind of belief of UMP international students do possess. The respondents were 30 male and female students. A survey was used in this study that was adapted from Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) as well as personal demographic background questionnaire. The findings show that the international university students held certain beliefs which would be detrimental to their speaking and performing oral presentation in English language as well

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in the study of silence as a linguistic tool used by humans for communication purposes. Many past researchers on the use of silence, however, concentrated on studying silence in the classroom context. Few studies, if at all available, are on conversational silence in academic discourse. Still, there is paucity of research on the effect of task types or students’ field of study on the use of conversational silence. This study sought to investigate the perceptions of Malaysian undergraduates on the use of conversational silence in academic discourse. It examined its use by two distinct groups of Malaysian students - science and non-science - in their academic interactions. It also determined the extent to which different academic task types affect the use of conversational silence by the two groups. In addition, it explored how culture plays a role in the use of conversational silence, and identified factors that contribute to...

Asians are said to use silence in academic situation more than other learners from Europe and America. With the increased need for students' oral participation in the language learning classroom and other academic situations, the Asian silent behavior has been considered a problem. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence by Malaysian science and non-science undergraduate students in academic discourse. Seventeen undergraduate students from a local university in Malaysia participated in a focus group interview which required them to respond to questions related to the beliefs of their culture on the use of silence, the extent to which the participants practice silence in academic discourse, and factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence. There were two groups each from the Departments of English and Computer and Communication System who informed the research. The study was underpinned by Brown and Levinson Politeness Theory, which is tied to the concept of 'face' as something that is highly valuable, and must be guarded in interaction. The findings suggest that some factors such as sociocultural upbringing, personality and intimidation by the environment play a role in the use of silence by the informants of this study.

The Palm Oil Supply Chain (POSC) is a series of companies dealing with materials or products derived from oil palm fresh fruit bunches. The chain is interdependent sequentially and cooperate in the control, management and improvement of the flow of products, money and information from the upstream side to the downstream side. The POSC consists of palm oil seed growers, farmers, traders, CPO factory, refinery factory, distributor/retailers, and consumers. The first party in the chain is the palm oil seed or seedling growers. These growers have a very important role for palm oil farmers because the quality of the seeds determines the quality of further fruits. The aims of this study are to evaluate the feasibility study of growing the seedlings, and measure the sensitivity of the factors to the profitability. By using modified Hayami method for the supply chain, the added value obtained is Rp5.950.227.861 which is 34,73% of the sales. The feasibility analysis calculation with an inter...

This paper explores the communication strategies employed by service providers in Nigeria banks to gain new and retain their old customers. This is done by looking at the discourse features inherent in banking interactions. The researcher was given the impetus to undertake this study because of the uniqueness exhibited in banking and business discourse. One could easily have drawn a conclusion that, as expected of every business interaction, the banking interaction would be without fuss because of the training employees receive on human relations, but these findings reveal that this is not always the case. However, the fact that employees have more successful interactions is one that cannot be denied, and this success can be attributed to the application of politeness strategies by bank staff. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory serves as theoretical framework. Eleven texts from bank employee-customers interactions were purposively selected and subjected to content analysi...

The study compared the plagiarism norms and practices among pre-university, diploma and degree students. The specific aspects examined were perceived necessity to include citations in assignments, preferred penalties for plagiarism, and academic writing practices. The questionnaire responses of 263 students from three levels of university education were analysed. The results showed that the perceived necessity for attribution in assignments is the highest for the degree students but the norm to require citations and to penalise omission of citations is not extensive at all three levels. A majority of the students felt that plagiarism should be penalised but preferred warning from their lecturer, assignment resubmission and counselling. Mosaic plagiarism is the most common whereby students combine texts from the same source or different sources without proper citation and referencing. The most common unethical help-seeking behaviour is copying another student's work. The findings suggest that while lack of knowledge on citation and referencing may lead to improper or non-attribution of sources, plagiarism cannot be dealt with by instruction on citation and referencing alone as respect for intellectual property can only be inculcated by treating plagiarism as a serious academic misdemeanour.

In the field of sociolinguistics, studies of the Japanese language have often highlighted its honorific system, claiming this to be a reflection of a hierarchical society. Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1978, 1987) regarded the unique honorific system as evidence that Japanese is a negative politeness oriented language. Besides being vertically structured, however, Japanese society places great emphasis on group harmony. Consensus within the group overrides any hierarchical differences individuals in the group may have. Such "group first" attitudes may be considered as what Brown and Levinson define as positive politeness, namely, sharing common ground and having camaraderie. We argue that these are indeed manifestations of the less commonly researched phenomenon of positive politeness in Japanese. In this paper, we examine the following five linguistic phenomena in Japanese: 1) Topics, 2) inductive development of talk, 3) co-constructions, 4)backchanelling, 5) pauses. The results of our quantitative and qualitative analyses of the above phenomena suggest that these four features function as positive politeness strategies in Japanese verbal behavior.

The Palm Oil Supply Chain (POSC) is a series of companies dealing with materials or products derived from oil palm fresh fruit bunches. The chain is interdependent sequentially and cooperate in the control, management and improvement of the flow of products, money and information from the upstream side to the downstream side. The POSC consists of palm oil seed growers, farmers, traders, CPO factory, refinery factory, distributor/retailers, and consumers. The first party in the chain is the palm oil seed or seedling growers. These growers have a very important role for palm oil farmers because the quality of the seeds determines the quality of further fruits. The aims of this study are to evaluate the feasibility study of growing the seedlings, and measure the sensitivity of the factors to the profitability. By using modified Hayami method for the supply chain, the added value obtained is Rp5.950.227.861 which is 34,73% of the sales. The feasibility analysis calculation with an inter...

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengidentifikasi jeda yang digunakan oleh mahasiswa pada saat presentasi seminar proposal thesis, faktor apa saja yang menyebabkan jeda dan persepsi audiens melalui penggunaan filler dalam presentasi proposal skripsi. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Sampel diambil dari mahasiswa jurusan Bahasa Inggris Universitas Negeri Makassar dengan menggunakan teknik snowball sampling. Jumlah sampel sebanyak 6 mahasiswa yang mempresentasikan proposal thesisnya untuk memenyelesaikan studi magister. Instrumen yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah wawancara dan kuesioner. Data yang diambil menunjukkan bahwa jeda yang paling banyak digunakan oleh siswa adalah jeda 'Ee' dan "Aa" dan banyak faktor yang menyebabkan penggunaan jeda seperti frekuensi, durasi, fungsi dan alasan utama dari jeda. Kuesioner digunakan untuk mengidentifikasi persepsi audiens terhadap penggunaan jeda dalam presentasi. Dari persepsi audiens kami mengetahui bahwa banyak peserta yang tidak dapat memahami presentasi dengan baik, dapat disebabkan oleh penggunaan jeda yang diisi dalam presentasi atau dapat juga disebabkan oleh faktor lain seperti koneksi. Meskipun demikian, beberapa peserta dapat melihat bahwa presenter menggunakan jeda yang diisi dalam presentasi. Selanjutnya peneliti menemukan bahwa jeda yang diisi dalam presentasi sangat mengganggu peserta, jika mereka sering menggunakan jeda yang diisi di tengah presentasi karena dapat mengganggu makna presentasi.

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in the study of silence as a linguistic tool used by humans for communication purposes. Many past researchers on the use of silence, however, concentrated on studying silence in the classroom context. Few studies, if at all available, are on conversational silence in academic discourse. Still, there is paucity of research on the effect of task types or students’ field of study on the use of conversational silence. This study sought to investigate the perceptions of Malaysian undergraduates on the use of conversational silence in academic discourse. It examined its use by two distinct groups of Malaysian students - science and non-science - in their academic interactions. It also determined the extent to which different academic task types affect the use of conversational silence by the two groups. In addition, it explored how culture plays a role in the use of conversational silence, and identified factors that contribute to...

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in the study of silence as a linguistic tool used by humans for communication purposes. Many past researchers on the use of silence, however, concentrated on studying silence in the classroom context. Few studies, if at all available, are on conversational silence in academic discourse. Still, there is paucity of research on the effect of task types or students’ field of study on the use of conversational silence. This study sought to investigate the perceptions of Malaysian undergraduates on the use of conversational silence in academic discourse. It examined its use by two distinct groups of Malaysian students - science and non-science - in their academic interactions. It also determined the extent to which different academic task types affect the use of conversational silence by the two groups. In addition, it explored how culture plays a role in the use of conversational silence, and identified factors that contribute to...

Asians are said to use silence in academic situation more than other learners from Europe and America. With the increased need for students' oral participation in the language learning classroom and other academic situations, the Asian silent behavior has been considered a problem. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence by Malaysian science and non-science undergraduate students in academic discourse. Seventeen undergraduate students from a local university in Malaysia participated in a focus group interview which required them to respond to questions related to the beliefs of their culture on the use of silence, the extent to which the participants practice silence in academic discourse, and factors that contribute to the use of conversational silence. There were two groups each from the Departments of English and Computer and Communication System who informed the research. The study was underpinned by Brown and Levinson Politeness Theory, which is tied to the concept of 'face' as something that is highly valuable, and must be guarded in interaction. The findings suggest that some factors such as sociocultural upbringing, personality and intimidation by the environment play a role in the use of silence by the informants of this study.

The Malaysian context is diverse in that there are three main ethnic and religious groups: Muslim Malay, Chinese Buddhist and Indian Hindus. These ethnic and religious groups are reflected in the staff composition at the University Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), a university on the East Coast of Malaysia. The site has been selected because, given the ethnic mix, there is potential for intercultural communication problems to surface among the staff which includes the three ethnic groups. The objective is to ascertain whether these communication patterns generate problems and conflict which may, in turn, affect the university's productivity.

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in the study of silence as a linguistic tool used by humans for communication purposes. Many past researchers on the use of silence, however, concentrated on studying silence in the classroom context. Few studies, if at all available, are on conversational silence in academic discourse. Still, there is paucity of research on the effect of task types or students’ field of study on the use of conversational silence. This study sought to investigate the perceptions of Malaysian undergraduates on the use of conversational silence in academic discourse. It examined its use by two distinct groups of Malaysian students - science and non-science - in their academic interactions. It also determined the extent to which different academic task types affect the use of conversational silence by the two groups. In addition, it explored how culture plays a role in the use of conversational silence, and identified factors that contribute to...

The purpose of this study is to encourage and highlight discussion on how to improve the teaching of research ethics in institutions of higher education in Malaysia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 academics in a research-intensive university in Malaysia, interviewees agreed on the importance of emphasizing the subject of research ethics among students, as well as academics or researchers. This study reveals that participants felt that there is an urgent need to improve the current awareness and knowledge of issues related to misconduct in research among students and academics. The results of this study indicate a need for better teaching on the subject of research ethics in order to prevent misconduct in research. Finally, it concludes with suggestions that there should be a clear definition of research misconduct, to include consequences when engaging in misconduct; a separate research ethics syllabus for pure and social sciences should be conducted; research ethics should be implemented as a core subject, and there should be an early intervention and continuous learning of research ethics, with an emphasis on ethics training.

Background – The importance placed on having good English language proficiency and skills to secure employment in Malaysia is a well-known fact. However, very little is known about the role of the English language in multilingual organisations within the agricultural industry in Malaysia. As such, this study aimed to examine the employees’ perception of the use of the English language in a professional context particularly in the Malaysian agricultural and agricultural related sectors.     Methods – A concurrent triangulation design was used to quantitatively evaluate the data. A total of 320 questionnaires from employees of 10 agriculture and agriculture related companies were analysed.  Additionally, interviews were also conducted with 10 employers from the human resources department as they provided deep insights into the language matters of the organisations.       Results – The employers and employees agree that English language proficiency has economic value and can play an im...

Malaysia is a nation of 30 million people living in an ethnically and religiously diverse society. Interpersonal arguing, an inherent feature of personal and public experience, seems never to have been previously studied in Malaysia. We did so here and compared results to those obtained in India, China, and the U.S. (where our theories and instruments originated). In Study 1 (N = 230), we found interesting distinctions between Malaysia and the other nations on several measures fundamental to the study of interpersonal arguing. Malaysians had a number of comparatively aggressive impulses, but these were tempered by their higher expectation of civility in arguments and their greater sophistication about the general nature of interpersonal disagreement. Malaysians had positive (not negative) correlations between argument-approach and argument-avoid, and between verbal aggressiveness (prosocial) and verbal aggressiveness (antisocial). Malaysia also produced very few sex differences. In ...

Communication among students from different nationalities who stay and study in multicultural university campuses is an important issue for their personal and academic lives. Among other concepts of communication, interpersonal communication which requires the direct interactions among communicators is important to be assessed. This study was carried out to assess the characteristics of interpersonal communication among international postgraduate students of a Malaysian public university. This study had 128 participants from 17 different countries, and the quantitative and qualitative methods were applied for the data collection procedure. Based on the results from this study, their stay and study in a multicultural university campus with students from various backgrounds helped the participants to have opportunities to interact with different people, and to gain some new personal and social skills and information. The results from this study confirmed that most of the participants ...

Analysing communication strategies remains crucial to overcome communication problems in classroom interaction since it directs the students to receive successful English learning results. One strategy to communicate is applying an appropriate language level of formality in the classroom. However, there have been very limited researches that explore formal and informal languages in the classroom context. This research aims to discuss the characteristics and factors influencing students in using formal and informal expressions in the classroom presentation-interaction. This research applied a qualitative method taking twenty-two students of Universitas Negeri Makassar as participants. The data from classroom observation, voice-recording, and interview were analysed using the discourse analysis approach. The result of the research shows that characteristics of formal and informal language are absolutely opposite, namely complete versus uncompleted sentence, politeness versus familiari...

Drawing on contact theory and the theory of cognitive development, educators and policy makers have encouraged students of different races to intermingle. However, the benefits of such contact in a Malaysian multiracial public university in which there is no real racial majority have not been adequately assessed. This study examined the extent to which interracial communication with peers contributes towards students' perceptions of the compatibility of different races. A total of 377 students participated in this self-administered survey. The results of the stepwise regression analyses showed that the quality of the students' interracial communication with their peers (not the intensity of the interracial communication) was a significant predictor of their perceptions of the compatibility of different races. This applied to both the Malay and the non-Malay students. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

This study was conducted to assess the role of interactions among international students from different nationalities on the process of internationalization of Malaysian higher education. An embedded design of mixed methods with the predominant role of the quantitative method was applied to conduct this study. The participants of this study were 118 international postgraduate students from a Malaysian public university, and based on their personal agreements, six of them were interviewed as well.  Based on the results, the presence and persuasions of students from their countries at universities and the emerging reputation of public universities in the host country were the main reasons that encouraged international students to enroll in the university. The findings of this study also illustrated that almost all participants of this study shared some information about the quality and standards of higher education in the host country with their friends in their own countries, and enc...

This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of different cultural backgrounds and co-ethnicity on the process of interpersonal communication (IPC) among local and international students of University Malaysia Pahang (UMP). An embedded design of mixed methods was applied to conduct this study. The quantitative survey was conducted as the main method of this study and the qualitative interviews were done to enrich the data. The quantitative survey had 220 participants from both Malaysian and international students of UMP, and 12 of them were interviewed for the qualitative data as well. According to the results, the vast majority of participants reported that their different cultural backgrounds had positive effects on their interactions with students from different nationalities and their interactions with different people enabled them to gain some new cultural information. Findings of this study also confirmed the helpful influence of coethnicity on interactions among students who had students from their own ethnicities and tribes among local or foreign students of UMP. The results are supportive of the positive effects of cultural and tribal diversities of both local and international students of UMP on their daily interactions. Findings of this study may encourage university students to be involved in interactions with students from different cultures and ethnicities to experience the new multicultural environments and improve their social skills through their interactions with people from different societies.

Daily interpersonal communication among students of different cultures and countries, and their personal and academic lives at the collegiate environments are among the important educational issues to be evaluated. Thus, this study aimed to assess the effects of daily interpersonal communication between local and international students of a Malaysian public university, University Malaysia Pahang (UMP) on their personal and academic lives. Findings of this research project may help the related policymakers and working-bodies at universities to improve communication and academic skills of students by increase of daily interaction opportunities among them. The quantitative survey with its 220 participants from both local and international students of UMP was applied as the main method of this study, and also qualitative interviews were conducted to enrich the data. According to the findings of this study, interactions between Malaysian and international students of UMP had positive effects on their personal and academic lives, and paved the ways for them to learn some essential communication skills, and also helped them to be happy, and have enough collaborative activities at the university campus. However, further studies may deepen the information on the related issues.

Translation plays a key role in foreign language learning and teaching. After the application of translation in Grammar Translation Method, the method had been inadvisable in classroom teaching and learning. However, translation strategies are undeniably one of multiply factors on achieving learners' target on acquiring a foreign language. Thus, this exploratory study aims to analyze Malaysian students' perception in applying translation to learn French and French students perceptions in applying translation to learn Malay as a foreign language. The respondents for this research were 20 Malaysian students learning advanced French from Universiti Putra Malaysia and 20 French students learning advanced Malay from Institut Nationale des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France. The study utilized qualitative method of data collection by using interviews as an instrument to investigate the perception of translation strategies by learners of both languages. The results showed ...

Background – The importance placed on having good English language proficiency and skills to secure employment in Malaysia is a well-known fact. However, very little is known about the role of the English language in multilingual organisations within the agricultural industry in Malaysia. As such, this study aimed to examine the employees’ perception of the use of the English language in a professional context particularly in the Malaysian agricultural and agricultural related sectors.     Methods – A concurrent triangulation design was used to quantitatively evaluate the data. A total of 320 questionnaires from employees of 10 agriculture and agriculture related companies were analysed.  Additionally, interviews were also conducted with 10 employers from the human resources department as they provided deep insights into the language matters of the organisations.       Results – The employers and employees agree that English language proficiency has economic value and can play an im...

This paper aims to describe the different point of view in collective behavior between legal context and business context. As in business context, in which collective bargaining concerns about a monetary system, a group of farmers can use collective bargaining as a tool to deal with injustice negotiation. Nowadays, a number of goods and services produced/provided are discovered to be determinate; namely, higher or lower wage of the workers, resulted from winning or losing the collective bargaining will affect to the price of goods sold or services provided. Collective bargaining is not an obsolete idea. The way to use it advantageously is depended on how much power bargainers realize they have. The strategy of collective bargaining in both legal and business perspective may be similar in some ways; but however, the format of conducting it may be different. In conclusion, to sustain the relationship between employees and employer or buyers and seller is to maximize both parties profit. When the needs of both parties are fulfilled, the outcomes will generate benefit for the society and all stakeholders.

Discourse-pragmatic impairment is one of the significant language disorders in patients with Dementia of the Alzheimer' s Type (DAT). In this study, meta-analysis is adopted to extract 238 indicators from 53 papers on DAT patients' connected speech. According to the definitions, the indicators are reorganized into 23 indicators, which can be summarized into three dimensions: cohesion, coherence, and conciseness. Weight is initially assigned to each indicator based on the frequency of these indicators. Furthermore, the differences in indexes, subjects, and language tasks are found to be the three main influential factors for the conclusion heterogeneity of the previous studies. Facing the difficult situation of population aging, China should further explore the language impairment of Chinese-speaking healthy elders and DAT patients, and construct the norm of language ability at the discourse-pragmatic level, providing the reference for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases.

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The study compared the plagiarism norms and practices among pre-university, diploma and degree students. The specific aspects examined were perceived necessity to include citations in assignments, preferred penalties for plagiarism, and academic writing practices. The questionnaire responses of 263 students from three levels of university education were analysed. The results showed that the perceived necessity for attribution in assignments is the highest for the degree students but the norm to require citations and to penalise omission of citations is not extensive at all three levels. A majority of the students felt that plagiarism should be penalised but preferred warning from their lecturer, assignment resubmission and counselling. Mosaic plagiarism is the most common whereby students combine texts from the same source or different sources without proper citation and referencing. The most common unethical help-seeking behaviour is copying another student’s work. The findings sug...

This paper highlights how Chinese-educated Chinese Malaysian undergraduate youth display a preference for not only collectivist but also individualist values, as indicated by the cultural capital based on preference in books. The study is based on the theoretical framework of cultural capital as introduced by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the choice of book preference as indicator follows a large scale study of modern China by Wang, Davis and Yanjie (2006). It is found that contrary to literature which suggests that the Chinese diaspora are more prone to collectivism, respondents of this small-scale study show openness to both collectivist and individualistic values. This indicates a cultural homogenisation effect on the cultural capital possession of respondents. As the study only includes a convenience sample of Chinese Malaysian undergraduates pursuing their undergraduate study through a Chinese-language medium, the findings are not meant to generalise the entire population.

approved Mary Jane Collier This study analyzed intercultural communication competence between Malays and Chinese in organizational and social settings in Malaysia. Two groups: Malays and Chinese in organizations in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), were studied. The intent of this study was to find similarities and differences in Malays and Chinese' communication styles. A total of forty-six respondents were surveyed: twenty-three Malay executives and twenty-three Chinese executives, in organizations in Malaysia. The organizations were selected based on their function, size, number of employees, ethnic composition, and location. The open-ended questionnaire was written in English and pretested. The revised questionnaire was sent to Kuala Lumpur to be administered by two interviewers who were from each ethnic groups. All of the responses from the questionnaire were interpreted and categorized by two Malay and two Chinese individuals who acted as coders. This study used thematic content an...

Aizuchi, feedback and insertion are the 3 important elements in a Japanese language conversation. Aizuchi and feedback can be categorized as short utterance. This paper discussed short utterance in a conversation between native speakers and non-native speakers of Japanese language based on writer’s research findings. This is because in general, students of Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) have problems in constructing a real-life conversation in Japanese language. This paper tried to analyze the conversational situation between two Malaysian tour guides and two Japanese tourists. The face-to-face conversation occured when the tour guides brought the tourists to Aquaria KLCC (G1&T1) and Istana Negara (G2&T2). This research intended to expose the conversation between the culture of native speaker and non-native speaker as a reference to students who are learning Japanese language.