Keywords in a longitudinal corpus of narrative writings by Malaysian Secondary School students / Chen Tien Mie

Chen , Tien Mie (2022) Keywords in a longitudinal corpus of narrative writings by Malaysian Secondary School students / Chen Tien Mie. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

A keyword in a corpus study refers to a word that is significantly more frequent in a particular corpus than the other (Hunston, 2002, p. 68). Keywords are also indicators of the “aboutness” of a particular text (Baker, 2004; Hyland, 2008; Bondi & Scott, 2010). In relation to second language development, translanguaging is defined as the “flexible use of linguistic resources by bilinguals to make sense of their worlds” (Garcia, 2014, p. 3). This present study focuses on the changing use of keywords from a translanguaging perspective over a five-month period across three points in time in a longitudinal corpus of 129 narrative essays of 43 bilingual and multilingual students. It was observed that the relative frequencies of keywords were not consistent over time. For example, the keywords, scared and excited showed a decrease in relative frequency over time while December, sibling, practise, hostel, scold and highland showed an increase. The keywords, Malaysia, colour, karaoke, favourite, celebrate and amazing first showed increase in relative frequency before decreasing over time. Changes were observed in the use of some keywords over a five-month period. The keyword, colour was initially used as a noun. Over time, colour as a noun was still used but in Time 3, it was used as an adjective. The keywords, celebrate and practise, initially used as verbs, were used as nouns in Time 3. Furthermore, a pattern of fluctuation was observed where a range of adverbs were seen to co-occur with three keyword adjectives, scared, excited, and amazing over time. In Time 3 particularly, only adverbs, extremely and most, and super and extra, have co-occurred with scared and excited respectively. This suggests that the development of learner language is an unpredictable and fluctuating process that is never linear (Larsen-Freeman, 2006). From a translanguaging perspective, it is observed that the students express meaning through their written linguistic variations that co-occurred with keywords. This is seen through their spelling and sentence variations while engaging in Bahasa Malaysia through words of peluang, ayah, keluarga and marah. These linguistic variations should not be viewed as errors (Canagarajah, 2011) but as a process of meaning making and a learning strategy for bilingual and multilingual to fully deploy their linguistic repertoires freely without regard for named languages (Otheguy, Garcia & Reid, 2015; Velasco & Garcia, 2014; Li & Ho, 2018).

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