Extracting noun forms: A lesson learnt

This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic constituent; NOUN, as reflected in the texts produced by business and management students in two higher learning institutions in Malaysia. As a descriptive and a corpus-based study, it explored the output of L2 learners in the business context, providing examples of NOUN used. The precise area investigated was the frequencies of the neutral noun, the singular noun, the plural noun and the proper noun forms of the written texts, reflecting the learners’ knowledge of applying this linguistic constituent into their written output. The method applied in the analysis is a computer-based learner corpus analysis consisting of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and a frequency analysis using concordance software. The findings indicated an over-usage of the singular noun form. The pedagogical contribution of this analysis is also discussed.