Lexical richness of newspaper editorials published in Southeast Asian countries

Abstract

This paper investigates the lexical richness of newspaper editorials written by the writers from ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) of Southeast Asian countries. Using editorial texts published on the same day in two major online newspapers from Malaysia and the Philippines as representative of ESL countries, and two major online newspapers published in Indonesia and Thailand that represent EFL countries, this paper compares the production of Type Token Ratio (TTR) as a measurement of the lexical richness. This study displays a profile of lexical richness gained by submitting the texts into a vocabulary profiler program namely Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) proposed by Laufer and Nation (1995) to highlight the emergence of the high-frequency word list (K1 and K2 words) and low-frequency word list (AWL and Off-list words). In general, the results show that in all terms of word lists, ESL texts have more varied vocabulary than EFL texts as indicated by the TTR scores (ESL: 0.51; EFL: 0.49). Although the gap of the TTR scores between ESL and EFL texts is slightly insignificant, a bigger TTR score indicates a high lexical richness, while a smaller TTR score shows a low lexical richness. The higher score of TTR in ESL texts could be understood since English plays an important role in education, governance policy and popular culture in those countries (i.e. Malaysia and the Philippines), meanwhile, in Indonesia and Thailand, it plays a lesser role.

Lexical Richness in Scientific Journal Articles: A Comparison between ESL and EFL Writers

“…It means that none of the null hypotheses was rejected. The results of this study were consistent with Indarti (2020), who pointed out that lexical richness in newspaper editorials by ESL and EFL was insignificant, with a slightly higher score in the ESL group. Similarly, ESL writers of this study demonstrated higher levels of English proficiency in using varied vocabulary than that of EFL in several aspects.…”

“…Similarly, ESL writers of this study demonstrated higher levels of English proficiency in using varied vocabulary than that of EFL in several aspects. In this case, Indarti (2020) explained that this finding could be clearly understood due to English was more broadly used in education and governance policy in ESL countries. As a result, these writers possessed advantages from English status and abundantly supportive environments to strengthen and cultivate their English competency more effectively.…”

“…Besides, although the investigation of lexical knowledge has gained popularity in several countries, there is still a limited amount of such kind of research carried out in ASEAN. For example, Indarti (2020) conducted his study in Indonesia to investigate lexical richness in "newspaper editorials" written by ESL and EFL writers of ASEAN. Similarly, he selected four countries, namely Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, to measure similarities and differences of lexical richness across the countries.…”

Phrasal Verbs in Rick Riordan’s Novel the Hammer of Thor: A Syntactic Analysis

“…The language itself is as a medium of the study to learn such context related to linguistics. Many studies include news articles as their objects of observation (Indarti, 2020;Msuya, 2020;Olugbenga, 2020;Ziyayeva, 2020). The writer provides more explanation of phrasal verbs by giving the tree diagram in order to be more explicitly described.…”

Syntactic Analysis of Sentence Patterns and Types of BBC News Articles

“…Both the patterns and types are the tools to frame the writing as the authors wish the readers to see, so they have similar ideas in mind. Many studies include news articles as their objects of observation (Indarti, 2020;Msuya, 2020;Olugbenga, 2020;Ziyayeva, 2020). However, to the best of our knowledge, the study on sentence patterns and types in newspaper articles is not extensively explored yet.…”