Welcome to the official website of the Centre for the Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning, Universiti Malaysia Sabah.

The CPKLL, or more affectionately known by its Malay language acronym PPIB (which stands for Pusat Penataran Ilmu dan Bahasa), was among the maiden academic departments conceived in conjunction with the establishment of Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Malaysia’s ninth public institution of higher learning back at in November 1994.

In accordance with the vision and mission of UMS’s founding fathers, PPIB has been conceptualised as a Centre to promote language studies, and more uniquely, liberal education, as a means to produce holistic, well-rounded, competent and highly employable graduates that would not only serve as quality human capital driving the national economic development agenda, but also patriotic and democratic citizens that would contribute significantly to the nation’s social and political advancement. Driven by its specific vision and mission, as well as its motto “inculcating values of humanity”, PPIB’s academic structure and curriculum have evolved during the last two-and-a-half decades of its inception to meet the demands of rapid global transformation driven by the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution (IR4.0). Indeed, the Centre’s diverse yet evolving curriculum is meant to continuously promote value-added, broad-based education to ensure UMS graduates are equipped with the relevant knowledge and skillsets required to compete, adapt and excel in both professional as well as personal realms.

To this end, the Centre offers a plethora of compulsory and elective courses to UMS undergraduate students, ranging from local, English and foreign languages to courses in the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, under the auspices of the Centre’s four designated clusters, namely the University Compulsory, Liberal Studies, English Language, and Local and Foreign Language clusters. Meanwhile, both master and doctoral research programmes are available for prospective students interested in pursuing postgraduate education in a number of fields, such as English Language Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Civilisation Studies and Political Science.

Apart from providing high quality teaching and learning at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, the Centre’s qualified academic staff members are also actively involved and engaged in discipline-specific as well as multi-/cross-disciplinary research endeavours in their respective fields of expertise. Most of the research output/outcomes are either translated into tangible community-driven programmes, and/or published scholarly works for societal benefits. Indeed, PPIB is highly supportive of the academic publication agenda. Subscribing to the notion of “publish or perish”, the Centre has consistently encouraged its academic staff to share their research findings in various forms of publication including books and journal articles. In fact, the Centre’s very own MANU Journal is among the earliest and most consistent in-house periodicals published by UMS, apart from its reputation as among the varsity’s most active academic departments in terms of producing books, monographs, and chapters in books, published either by UMS or renowned international publishers.

Ultimately, PPIB strives to provide the best possible teaching and learning as well as research environment to both staff and students. The multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary characteristics of PPIB’s demography speaks volume, as its academic community has uniquely stood out since the Centre’s inception, as amongst the most culturally, internationally, and disciplinary diverse in the national higher education scene. From Japanese and Koreans to English and Colombian, among others, its expatriate teaching community both past and present, has had striven hand in hand with their Malaysian colleagues to uphold the spirit of liberal and language education in the quest towards realising the vision and mission of the Centre and the varsity.

To UMS students, we at PPIB are steadfastly committed to not only broadening your knowledge and skillsets, but equally to enrich your learning experience in our collective pursuit to transform you into becoming holistic individuals who are ready to face the challenges of the job market and the world in general.

To prospective partners/collaborators, we would like to invite you to browse through the profiles of our academic staff and to explore the possibilities for collaboration in areas such as research, publication and community work. We relish the opportunity to forge links with other institutions and organisations so that we may continue to grow and develop as an educational establishment and consequently be of better service to our local community, our nation and society as a whole.

We welcome you to join us and be part of this exciting endeavour.