From language learners to dynamic meaning makers: a longitudinal investigation of Malaysian secondary school students’ development of English from text and corpus perspectives

This thesis considers how language development takes place over time by a group of 124 secondary school students of English. A series of five studies were conducted for this purpose using the tools and methods from corpus linguistics and written discourse analysis. Specifically, the thesis presents a detailed analysis of (1) how a set of function words (that, to and of) were used by these students over a 24-month period, and (2) how narrating practices concerning the structure of selected individual texts changed over time. The two distinct strands of investigation, both of which based on an inductive methodology, highlight, on the one hand, the extent to which there are common as well as unique aspects of language use observed across time and space (Francis et al., 1996, 1998) and, on the other, the role of human agency and meaning making practices in using linguistic resources over time and in shaping and constructing texts within and across individuals. Taken together, the overall inductive methodology and an emphasis on treating all instances of the conventionally labelled ‘learner language’ as equally valid features of natural human language use, show clear advantages over alternative approaches based on a deficit model