Argumentative writing has been regarded as an essential form of written discourse in Malaysia, specifically in Malaysian University English Test (MUET). However, limited research has been conducted on the MUET argumentative essay writing component for pre-university students. The purpose of this preliminary study is to investigate a compiled representative learner corpus to conduct an analysis of the linguistic features; lexical verbs used in Band 3 and Band 5 argumentative essays produced by students of a pre-university college in Malaysia. Subsequently, the lexical verbs utilized in the respective essays were compared. As a descriptive analysis and corpus-based study, the use of lexical verb forms was examined, reflecting the learners' knowledge of applying this linguistic constituent into their written essays. The method applied in the analysis is a computer-based learner corpus analysis. Results revealed that Band 5 essays contained more '-ing' participle (VVG) form, whereas Band 3 essays revealed the use of more past participle (VVN) form. Surprisingly, both groups avoided the base form of lexical verb (VVO). The pedagogical implications based on the results of the study were proposed and the ideas for future research were discussed.

The need to focus future education according to the actual needs of the learners can be realized by conducting a well-placed research within the prospective requirements of its context. However, evaluating and accessing the actual linguistics needs of learners is undeniably a challenging undertaking. This paper presents steps taken to conduct a descriptive and a corpus-based study. It explored the written essays produced by ESL learners. The areas of investigation involved examining the strategies used by the language learners while preparing the essays, the frequency of part-of-speech (POS) used in the essays and sentence level syntactical analysis of the most frequently used POS. The methodology applied is fundamental as it tends to investigate the linguistic constituents in the compiled corpus. Computer-based syntactical studies are limited as it requires hard work, long hours and complex analytic method of describing the findings. In contrast, this article demonstrated an uncomplicated method of analysis and also encourages the use of existing part-of speech (POS) tagging software available online. The findings show that the students are using mainly the past participle form of the lexical verb (VVN) when preparing the written essays. As recommendations for future research, this paper proposes structural linguistics investigations such as frequency analyses, sentence level syntactical analyses (SLSA), examining the distributional patterns of sentence level linguistic structural patterns and subject-verb agreement analyses reflecting the writers' knowledge of applying their grammatical linguistics knowledge into their written output be conducted within various contexts where language is used.