Vocabulary Index as a Sustainable Resource for Teaching Extended Writing in the Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Malaysian English teachers identified a pressing need to support upper primary school pupils, particularly those in the upper levels, in the effective composition of extended writing. Additionally, these educators required more innovative methodologies for teaching vocabulary in this context. Consequently, the current study aimed to develop a vocabulary index as a suggested resource for Malaysian English teachers instructing upper primary school pupils on extended writing. To achieve this, a quantitative computational research strategy and corpus-driven research design were employed. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 560 advanced upper primary school pupils from 28 schools, each with high English performance in the capital of each state and the federal territory of Malaysia, who produced a total of 152,187 words in extended writing for analysis. LancsBox, a primary computational linguistics application, was used for data processing. Given that the vocabulary index for extended writing necessitates a more comprehensive coverage of vocabulary, functional and content words were included, and keywords, raw and normalised frequencies were analysed and reported. Through the vocabulary index built in this study, the researchers found English teachers in Malaysia should utilise local issues in writing prompts, emphasise the use of both positive and negative adjectives, introduce complex sentence structures to enhance pupils’ writing abilities and also train pupils to organise the ideas in their writing. Future linguistic studies could replicate the present investigation, so that it can respond to their classroom needs.