Reflection Week 10 - Corpus Linguistics (Topic for MA Thesis)

Peace be upon you

Include a suggestion for a possible (Corpus Linguistic) topic for your MA thesis.

There are many topics that we would like to study for our thesis in Master Degree. For example, Corpus-based analysis of English grammar, idioms in dictionaries, language used in children story books, tracking changes of lexical/grammatical features in Malaysian English and so forth.

However, there is one particular topic that all of us agreed and find it intriguing to explore. The topic is differences between British and American English spelling used by Malaysian students in a classroom context. We noticed that many students unconsciously mixing between British and American spelling in their writing. Therefore, we would like to find out which spelling is more preferred by Malaysian students and why this is happening. For what we know, Malaysia follows British English and for that reason we were taught with British English spelling. However, over the years, the mixing between British and American spelling become apparent, especially for tertiary students. Based on our assumption, this is probably because of many of the sources used by students follow American spelling. Thus students unconsciously use the same spelling in their writing. Nonetheless, this is only an assumption.

By using concordancer, we can gather lots of texts written by Malaysian students and analyze it carefully. We can also find out the frequency of word ending with ‘-re’ (British) and ‘-er’ (American) as in theater vs theatre, word with ‘-se’ (British) and ‘-ze’ (American) as in organise vs organize used by Malaysian students.