Malaysian Discourse Research Articles

Culturally appropriate communication in Malaysia: budi bahasa as warranty component in Malaysian discourse

This paper discusses the Malaysian cultural appropriateness (CA), budi bahasa in communication. CA is a root anchoring Malaysian life and, indeed, all things Malaysian. Society inculcates the norms and taboos with clear-cut identification of the dos and don'ts in relational communication among (and between) Malaysians. Although Malaysians may practice different religious rituals or hold different ideologies, they still pay attention to being appropriate and polite in communication to respect each other's differences, a vital concern for those living in this multicultural country. In no small measure, budi (virtue/politeness) helps govern the rules of communication, but the term is nuanced, carrying with it multiple meanings derived from the cultural context. Traditionally, respect, care for other people's emotion, politeness and language use are among the criteria measuring a budi bahasa (man of culture). But, there are other measures as well. Budi bahasa (man of culture) is incorporated in the principles articulated in the Rukunegara.

Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya

Ross King’s Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space inMalaysia provides a provocative interpretation of urban landscapes inKuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, a recently built government administrativecenter. He attempts to explicate meanings of the built urban environment aswell as its history, ideology, and contemporary possibilities.Consisting of a preface, five chapters, and an afterword, the book ishighly illustrated with pictures, sketches, maps, and architectural plans. Inthe preface, King introduces the dilemma of Malaysian nationalism, imagininga multicultural nation with a politically dominant Malay Muslimmajority, through the specter of the fiftieth anniversary of independence.He informs us that its two venues – Kuala Lumpur’s jumbled, multi-communityspaces and Putrajaya’s purely Malay pan-Islamic spaces – indicatesan ambivalent identity: Kuala Lumpur, “historically a Chinese town … istoday the capital of a nation that privileges the Malays” (p. xxiii). He immediatelymoves to selectively deconstruct Malay identity, stating that it is “inthe main a construction of the colonial era” during which people of diverseorigins from insular Southeast Asia migrated to the Peninsula (ibid). Thisoft-repeated assertion, which is a hotly contested topic in Malaysian discourse,indicates a slant toward the widespread Chinese Malaysian perspectivethat Malays are not the country’s true “natives.” King also states thathis focus will be to “read” the messages of architecture in terms of thingsobserved, imagined, forgotten, and potentially reconciled along with somehistorical background ...

Islam dan Civil Society

The article tries to address the concept of civil society from varied perspectives. From a historical point of view, civil society demands not only the absent domination of state but also liberates individuals from the hegemony of state. The article shows that in Indonesia and Malaysian discourse, masyarakat madani is often used to represent the term of civil society. Using this conception, major values of civil society also share with basic ideas within the Medina Treaty in the history of Islam. These ideas include egalitarianism, human rights protection, participation, law and justice enforcement and pluralism. In this frame, the question on whether or not Islam is compatible with the concept of civil society is clearly answered. Muslims could benefit such a concept to build their awareness of being progressive and adaptive to social changes.

Making history in Malaysian schools: how the pedagogic discourse of history functions in Malaysian classrooms

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.

Grammar in the Language Classroom: Changing Approaches and Practices (review)

Reviewed by: Grammar in the Language Classroom: Changing Approaches and Practices Ellen Cray James, Joyce E. (Ed.). (2003). Grammar in the Language Classroom: Changing Approaches and Practices. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre. Pp. 357, $16.00 US (paper). Grammar in the Language Classroom: Changing Approaches and Practices is an anthology of papers selected from the 2001 RELC International Seminar. Ideally a book like this would offer a range of perspectives on a central theme. This volume is meant to offer that type of survey; but, as is often the case, this ideal is not realized. The papers included cover such a range of topics and approaches that it is difficult for the reader to gain a sense of any unifying theme. The titles give a sense of the difficulty: they include 'The New Englishes and the Teaching of Grammar'; 'Lexicogrammar and Language Teaching Materials: A Social Semiotic and Discourse Perspective'; and 'Grammar and the Study of Poetry.' Given this diversity, it is a challenge to understand what the volume is about. There is a more serious problem with what is offered here. In spite of the range of topics covered, very little attention is given to current debates about and approaches to the teaching of grammar. While academics and methodologists are discussing such things as the place of focus-on-form (FonF) activities in the language classroom and the possible place of discourse grammars and language corpora, the only paper that addresses these issues is Tony T.N. Hung's chapter, 'How Linguistics Can Contribute to the Teaching of Grammar.' This paper provides a good summary of the ways in which such areas as corpus linguistics, descriptive grammars, theoretical grammars, and interlanguage analysis have contributed to second language teaching. The author does make an important point in the conclusion when he argues that linguistics, in its diverse forms, can serve to encourage the understanding that spoken language is not an inferior variety of language and [End Page 283] that variation in language is both natural and desirable; but he does not explain how linguistics can help teachers to accept these propositions. Many of the papers in this volume are grounded in traditional notions of pedagogical grammars and language learning. Jason Lim Min Hwa's paper on acquisition of the past tense uses contrastive analysis to explain problems that speakers of Bahasa Melayu have in judging the acceptability of sentences with simple past tense verbs and time adverbials. He then outlines an approach to teaching the simple past + adverbials based on a sequencing of rules. While it is clear that a great deal of thought has gone into this paper, it does not seem relevant to current discussions in the field of pedagogical grammar and explicit instruction. That said, there are two topics addressed in more than one paper that are relevant and interesting. The first is the issue of grammar and the new Englishes. In her paper 'Grammar and Identity in Malaysian Discourse,' Azirah Hashim explores how English-speaking Bahasa Melayu speakers vary their English production on the basis of context. She concludes that English speakers develop the ability to use the resources of both Bahasa Melayu and English to produce a variety of English that accommodates the particular context in which they are speaking and writing. Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista, writing about Philippine English, concludes that teachers need to be aware that there is a place for both exonormative and endonormative varieties of the language, noting that it important for teachers to recognize the value and importance of local varieties of English. Two authors attempt to move grammar away from sentence-level considerations to the discourse level. David Butt, in his paper 'Investigating Experience through Grammars: From Personal to Cultural Perspectives on the Evolution of School Knowledge,' argues that in order to learn language one must learn how to produce and communicate meaning and that grammar is a tool that allows investigation of text. Peter Mickan's very brief article is based on a similar argument - that the study of texts allows teachers to integrate form and meaning and that grammar is one of the tools that makes this study of texts possible. When read carefully and critically, the...