Brunei Written English
Full Title : An Investigation of the Characteristics of Brunei School Learners' Written English
Project Number : UBD/PNC2/2/RG/1(44)
Start Date :
End Date : December 2007
Project leader : Alex Henry
Team members : Adrian Clynes, Alistair Wood, Malai Ayla Surya Malai Hj Abdullah
Brief Outline
Nineteen years after the implementation of a Malay-English bilingual education system in Brunei Darussalam, it was still not clear how successful the policy had been. While some commentators recognised that the system was producing well educated balanced bilinguals, detailed studies seemed to indicate that improvements need to be made. This project aimed to use the latest techniques in small corpus linguistics to investigate the language development of pupils in three secondary schools in Brunei Darussalam (an elite school in the capital city, a semi-rural school in Tutong and a rural school in Temburong). The primary aim of the project was to produce a descriptive profile of language development in three schools in the country. The results of the project allowed the research team to identify some of the specific discourse, lexical and grammatical problems that students in the secondary school were experiencing. It is hoped that these insights will be used to inform English language materials writing and syllabus design in the Bruneian education system as well as providing a valuable teaching and learning resource.
Report : PDF Copy of final report