A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie

Weblogs ushered a new epoch for Malaysian ESL learners ever since its first entry to Malaysia in 1998 (Hopkins, 2010). Since then, scholars in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) have paid considerable attention to blogging, especially those who teach writing courses (Mah and Er, 2009...

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Main Author: Huang, Wen Jie
Format: Thesis
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/
http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/1/Final_paper%2Dhuang_wen_jie.pdf
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author Huang, Wen Jie
author_facet Huang, Wen Jie
author_sort Huang, Wen Jie
building UM Research Repository
collection Online Access
description Weblogs ushered a new epoch for Malaysian ESL learners ever since its first entry to Malaysia in 1998 (Hopkins, 2010). Since then, scholars in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) have paid considerable attention to blogging, especially those who teach writing courses (Mah and Er, 2009; Mah and Liaw, 2011; Gedera, 2012; Kaur, Ganapathy, and Sidhu, 2012; Yunus, Kiing, and Salehi, 2013; Ubaidullah, Mahadi, and Ching, 2013). However, little research has been undertaken from a sociolinguistic perspective, let alone gender-oriented to analyse adults’ weblogs. To fill the gap and promote online communication in an ESL community, the present study uses a corpus-driven approach and via a corpus tool, namely, Wmatrix (Rayson, 2013) to tag the key semantic domains (primary) and parts of speech (auxiliary) in 200 ESL weblogs produced by 100 Malaysian females and 100 males from http://www.blogmalaysia.com/. Quantitative results reveal gender differences identified by the log-likelihood value in females’ and males’ use of key semantic domains and parts of speech. Findings reveal that certain semantic domains and parts of speech are more significant and predominantly found in the female weblogs compared to the males. The findings are also attributed to socio-cultural contexts. Future research can be conducted with other groups of bloggers and a larger corpus is also recommended. Keywords: Corpus linguistics, semantic domain, part of speech, weblog, gender, Wmatrix
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spelling um-55072015-06-26T13:26:28Z A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie Huang, Wen Jie P Philology. Linguistics T Technology (General) Weblogs ushered a new epoch for Malaysian ESL learners ever since its first entry to Malaysia in 1998 (Hopkins, 2010). Since then, scholars in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) have paid considerable attention to blogging, especially those who teach writing courses (Mah and Er, 2009; Mah and Liaw, 2011; Gedera, 2012; Kaur, Ganapathy, and Sidhu, 2012; Yunus, Kiing, and Salehi, 2013; Ubaidullah, Mahadi, and Ching, 2013). However, little research has been undertaken from a sociolinguistic perspective, let alone gender-oriented to analyse adults’ weblogs. To fill the gap and promote online communication in an ESL community, the present study uses a corpus-driven approach and via a corpus tool, namely, Wmatrix (Rayson, 2013) to tag the key semantic domains (primary) and parts of speech (auxiliary) in 200 ESL weblogs produced by 100 Malaysian females and 100 males from http://www.blogmalaysia.com/. Quantitative results reveal gender differences identified by the log-likelihood value in females’ and males’ use of key semantic domains and parts of speech. Findings reveal that certain semantic domains and parts of speech are more significant and predominantly found in the female weblogs compared to the males. The findings are also attributed to socio-cultural contexts. Future research can be conducted with other groups of bloggers and a larger corpus is also recommended. Keywords: Corpus linguistics, semantic domain, part of speech, weblog, gender, Wmatrix 2015 Thesis NonPeerReviewed application/pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/1/Final_paper%2Dhuang_wen_jie.pdf Huang, Wen Jie (2015) A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie. Masters thesis, University of Malaya. http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/
spellingShingle P Philology. Linguistics
T Technology (General)
Huang, Wen Jie
A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title_full A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title_fullStr A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title_full_unstemmed A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title_short A corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an ESL context / Huang Wen Jie
title_sort corpus-driven analysis of male and female weblog users in an esl context / huang wen jie
topic P Philology. Linguistics
T Technology (General)
url http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/
http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5507/1/Final_paper%2Dhuang_wen_jie.pdf