In The Name of Allah Most Gracious Most Merciful
I’m Dr Sarimah binti Shamsudin, a Senior Lecturer from the Language Academy in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur Campus. I have been an academic staff at UTM for at least 20 years. My career in UTM started off as a Language Teacher on 23rd July 1992. In 1995, I was appointed as a Tutor and pursued my Masters Degree at Aston University, UK. Upon completion of my Masters Degree in Teaching English for Specific Purposes, I was appointed as a UTM lecturer in 1997. My pursuit for knowledge and career advancement led me to pursue my PhD after teaching in UTM for ten years. In 2008, I was awarded a PhD in ELT and Applied Linguistics from the University of Warwick, UK. Two years later, I was promoted to the position of Senior Lecturer. During my 20-year service in UTM, I received two awards, “Anugerah Kepujian Universiti 2001” and “Anugerah Perkhidmatan Cemerlang 2008”. While pursuing my PhD degree, I received funding from the University of Warwick to present my PhD research findings at a conference in Arizona, USA in 2003 and another funding from the organizers of E-Ducation Without Borders Conference to share my PhD research results at their conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in 2005. I was also invited to publish my PhD work in a journal called Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Vol. 19, No. 4 & 5, 2006) after presenting it at a conference in Ireland in 2005.
Throughout my career at UTM, apart from fulfilling the responsibilities of teaching English Language proficiency courses and supervising TESL students with their research projects at the undergraduate, masters and PhD level, I was involved in students’ affairs and extra curricula activities as a Felo for five years. Two years in Kampung Belian, while I was a Language Teacher and three years at Kolej Tun Fatimah after completing my Masters Degree. During my service as a Felo, I was also involved in conducting workshops and activities to improve not only UTM students’ English language proficiency but also students’ in the public schools, specifically children of FELDA settlers with the assistance of UTM students and staff.
Among the major administrative duties that I carried out as an academic staff are to assume the duties of Deputy Dean of Language Academy in UTM KL, Head of English Language Panel (Language Academy) and Head of English language labs in UTM JB and UTM KL. During my 4-year tenure as the Head of Language Lab in UTM JB (Jan 1999-March 2002), with the assistance of the Language Lab committee members and top administrators of UTM, we managed to secure funding to transform four of our analogue labs to state-of-the-art digital language labs. One other lab was upgraded using funding from UTM. Recently, we were successful in securing funding to upgrade one language lab in UTM KL and another in UTM JB during my term as Coordinator of the Language Labs in UTM KL (2011-now).
My passion for research enabled me work in collaboration with researchers in Malaysia and overseas to secure research funding from UTM, the Ministry of Higher Education and the British Council to conduct research in the areas of English for Specific Purposes, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis and Computer-Assisted Language Learning. In UTM, I took part in the assessment of UTM students Test of English Communication Skills (TECS) exams. Being a life member of the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA), I participated quite regularly at its annual conference as a paper presenter and have been appointed as a reviewer of articles for its journal called The English Teacher since 2011. I have also been appointed to review papers for publication in UKM’s journal called GEMA and papers for our LSP conference. Over the years, I managed to publish several research articles in a few journals along with my co-researchers, undergraduate, masters and PhD students. I have also published two books with my colleagues. Currently, my google scholar citation index is 20 (h-index is 2 and i-10 index is 1) and hope to improve it in the near future.
One of the UTM projects that I am involved in currently is the Global University Project called “UTM Speaks to the World” which entails conducting research on the communication needs and wants of UTM drivers and security officers and designing as well implementing training modules to help improve their communicative skills. The other is the Blossoms Project in which I am working in collaboration with a few Civil Engineering lecturers to design video clips in English that aims to improve learners’ understanding of concepts related to Civil Engineering.
There is so much more that I hope to accomplish throughout my career as an academic staff in UTM in terms of designing and implementing innovative teaching and learning techniques as well as conducting quality research and publication. Nevertheless, I hope that the minimal contribution that I have made so far would play a part in facilitating UTM to achieve its mission of being a leader in the development of human capital and innovative technologies that will contribute to the nation’s wealth and its vision of becoming recognized as a world-class centre of academia and technological excellence with the help of Allah the Almighty.
You can contact me via email, tel or fax.
email: ssarimah.kl@utm.my
office tel.: 006-03-26154424, 006-03-26154479
fax: 006-03-26154212
