Using Technologised Computational Corpus-Driven Linguistics Study on the Vocabulary Uses Among Advanced Malaysian Upper Primary School English as a Second Language Learners (ESL) in Northern Region

Abstract

The vocabulary used by advanced Malaysian upper primary school learners is unknown after the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a corpus-driven study. This study primarily uses data from a learner corpus. This main purpose of this paper is to fill in this knowledge gap by examining the vocabulary usage in extended writing by advanced Malaysian upper primary school learners in the Northern Region. The study uses a corpus-driven research strategy and a quantitative methodology. Some 160 advanced upper primary school learners from the Northern Region, Malaysia were included in the study. They attended eight national primary schools with strong English programmes in the Northern Region. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the samples. This study's main corpus-driven toolkit (LancsBox) was used to analyse the data. A total of 46,185 tokens from 160 extended writing tasks were analysed. The word frequencies were counted both raw and normalised. Results showed that 160 advanced Malaysian upper primary school learners in West Malaysia used the frequently and preferably in extended writing followed by the, and vocabulary be is the twentieth salient vocabulary over other vocabulary such as to, and, a, and I. Depending on their perspectives, one may argue that they described their experiences in the first person. These findings imply that advanced Malaysian upper primary school learners use to, and, a, of, in, is, it, that, for, as and within their extended writing. The findings provide important knowledge and information for ESL teachers to improve the writing grammatical proficiency, especially for extended writing of ESL learners.