fourth posting..

BEYOND CONCORDANCE LINES: USING CONCORDANCES TO INVESTIGATE LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

The usage of corpus has become essential in language teaching and learning worldwide.The main function of corpus is to make the process of learning grammar and linguistic fun and enjoyable. However, the usage of corpora in Malaysia is quite limited. Eventhough, there are good corpus compiled by UTM and UM, it is simply unavailable and out of reach. The existence of EMAS or English for Malaysian school student by UPM was collected back then in 2002 and consists of approximately half a million word (Arshad et al.,2002). The EMAS Corpora contains data in written form of three essays by 800 students ranging from Year 5 of primary school and Form 1 and Form 4 of the secondary who are proficient in English.
The content of the essay differ from one another. The first essay were conducted by the researchers during their visit to school as students were asked to write about fishing trip. The latter essay, however, were administered by teachers from selected schools which entitled The happiest day of my life while the final essay were selected among their take home essays.
The ultimate purpose of the language corpus is to determine language development. Data in the EMAS corpus were implied based on the usage of English of various age groups. The maturing patterns involves the amount of produced language and the use of academic vocabulaty by students.
Language productivity, as we discussed here were symbolised by the number of sentences per essays and the words per sentence. It is used as a tool to examine language development. The result showed that the older student (Form 4) wrote longer essays and built longer sentences.
In terms of the range of vocabulary, the token ratio were often measured by dividing the number of separate words in a text (type) by the number of words in text (token). (Laufer and Nation 1995)
A larger type signifies a more extensive ranged of language used while smaller type is often associated with over-reliance on a limited set of words.
Last but no least, the sophistication of the vocabulary can be tested by using specific software such as RANGE. (Nation, 2002). It is a software used to indicate the type of vocabulary used in essays. The software worked by listing frequently used words, second most frequently used words and words which are out of the first two list but common in higher educational levels such as scientific terminologies or even law maxims.
In conclusion, the future of language corpus in Malaysia seems to be bright as the authorities showed interest in that area in order to determine language devolepment of each individuals in this developing nation.

By:

Nur Ili Athirah binti Mohd Nor
Azlin Nadiah binti Husin