Analysis of Covid-19 related Phrases Using Corpus-Based Tools: Dualisms Language & Technology

Abstract

Since 2020, COVID-19 has become a contemporary topic of study in a wide variety of disciplines. One of these is education, since the linguistic competence of Malaysian International high school learners is unknown as physical schooling has been replaced by online learning, which involves no formal language tests. Hence, a corpus-based analysis of salient phrases related to COVID-19 among Malaysian international high school learners through data visualisation makes a useful contribution because it is concerned with both COVID-19 and the linguistic competence of such learners. The study’s main objective is to recognise these salient phrases in extended writing. A quantitative strategy was employed, focusing on quantitative computational linguistics analysis with a corpus-based methodology. On a methodological level, it analyses salient phrases, concordances, log-likelihood values, and their semantic domains using LancsBox, trigram from N-grams, a log-likelihood calculator, and the USAS semantic tagger. The findings include the ten most salient phrases discovered for the trigram and related concordances, as well as their associated semantic domains. Overall, the study reports the linguistic competence evident among Malaysian international high school learners post-COVID-19 and contributes to the corpus-based education research literature.