Nativisation of Malaysian English lexis by Malaysian Indian pre-service English teachers / Nur Aida binti Ahmad Nazeri
Malaysian English (MalE), one of the non-native varieties of English, has reached the nativisation phase (Schneider, 2003, 2007) where lexico-grammatical restructuring mostly occurs. While previous finding are mostly based on spoken data, the mass media, literary works or a mixture of the aforeme...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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2014
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5474/ http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5474/1/final_manuscript_nur_aida.pdf |
| Summary: | Malaysian English (MalE), one of the non-native varieties of English, has reached the
nativisation phase (Schneider, 2003, 2007) where lexico-grammatical restructuring
mostly occurs. While previous finding are mostly based on spoken data, the mass
media, literary works or a mixture of the aforementioned sources, the written language
of young Malaysian adults has not been extensively researched. This study seeks to
describe the nativisation of MalE lexis in four contexts of writing, and determine the
differences in usage of nativised lexis in these contexts of writings. The primary data
was obtained from nineteen pre-service English teachers of Indian ethnicity undergoing
a foundation course in a teacher training institute. Within seven weeks, three sets of
writing tasks were given to participants. In each set of task, they were asked to write a
narrative essay and then to write about the same topic but in a formal context. These
essays were analysed using Baskaran’s (1994, 2005), Ooi’s (2001) and Anthonysamy’s
(1997) frameworks. Then the extracted data were analysed for the differences of usage
using four methods: contextual cushioning, flagging, outer/inner frame and number of
MalE lexis per text per 1000 words. A secondary data, a questionnaire, was conducted
on the same nineteen pre-service English teachers and six language educators to
represent educated adult MalE users. Though based on a small sample, the findings
corroborated the documented findings about MalE lexis and provided an in depth study
of the differences of usage of the MalE lexis in the writings of educated young adult
Malaysians and a way to refine Baskaran’s (2005) broad and general description of
MalE lectal continuum by incorporating Ooi’s (2001) concentric model as the criteria
for the three levels of lexical description. |
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