This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

This research studied the use of modals in argumentative written tasks by Form 5 Malaysian secondary school ESL students. The aim of this study was to examine the use of English modals at the syntactic level from data presented in the MCSAW Corpus. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis aided by…

It is often claimed that ELT textbook materials are mostly unwittingly intuitively- rather than empirically-based and that this bookish form of language is far from reflecting the real language use. The present study, by adopting a corpus-based approach, tends to shed light on the extent of agreement between the Malaysian ESL textbooks and the…

Studies on ESL/EFL learners' use of the progressives reveal that it is one of the grammatical aspects most problematic to them. This paper presents the results of a study on the use of progressives among Year 5, Form 1 and Form 4 Malaysian ESL learners' compositions using the English of Malaysian School Students (EMAS) corpus. The purpose of this…

The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials have been emphasized by many researchers owing to the fact that the studies of authentic texts have revealed some inconsistencies between the use of grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in language textbooks that are based purely on hunch. Therefore, by…

Using corpus approach, over the past two decades, a growing number of researchers started to blame textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in real language use and provided ample information about the mismatch between language used in textbooks and real language in use. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian…

One of the important decisions to be made by English Language Teaching (ELT) material developers or educators in various disciplines concerns the selection of vocabulary items that a learner should learn intentionally or unintentionally. Learning new vocabulary from textbooks or academic texts should begin with the scrutiny of the frequent types…

This article presents a corpus-based investigation on English prepositions which are presented in three English language textbooks used by lower secondary schools in Malaysia. The aims were to find out the distributions of prepositions, its frequency order in comparison with the British National Corpus (BNC) and the differences in terms of their…