A study of education-related chinese words used in Malaysia-based computer corpus

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify local Chinese education-related words based on the Malaysian Education Corpus (KPM) and its resulting factors. KPM is the main corpus, while the China Education Corpus (KPC) is a comparable corpus and BLCU Chinese Corpus (BCC) is a reference corpus. KPM data include national news and articles related to the issue of education in three types of Chinese newspapers in Malaysia from January 2011 to December 2013, namely Sinchew Daily, Nanyang Siang Pau and Guang Ming Daily. After KPM was tagged, it was then run through AntConc 3.2.4w software to be processed. Education-related words obtained from a wordlist were then identified and validated by checking against a dictionary for education encyclopedia and then referred to seven experts. These words were then searched in the KPC and BCC. A total of 69 local education words which are only used in the KPM were detected. Almost all of these words are nouns, and only one word is a verb, namely 国小化 (make it like national schools). Most of the local words are related to schools, people involved in education as well as teaching and learning. The differences in concept, policy, system and organisation of education between Malaysia and China have generated local nouns. Diversity of school, class and ethnicity in Malaysia have also produced various types of nouns that refer to local schools, classrooms as well as students. In addition to social factors, borrowing, translation from the Malay language and abbreviation are also factors resulting in the existence of local words. There is also a coined noun which refers to festivals related to education in Malaysia. It is hoped that the findings will be incorporated into global Chinese dictionaries in the future to make the dictionaries more current.