The paper examines the use of 'faith' in football through the analysis of the patterns of its co-occurrences in the corpus of football news articles in The Star, a local Malaysian English language newspaper. These articles have been produced by the local news authors who claim to be the faithful of particular football teams. The use of 'faith' has been found to express and call for the allegiance towards the preferred teams which is addressed to the audience in general. In this sense, the overdetermined role of the authors as the news producers and the supporters of certain football teams may contribute to how they are represented in the media. Moreover, 'faith' has often been limited to religion and little is known about its use in sport and representation. Hencethe investigation is aimed at making sense of the meanings of 'faith' in the context of football to further unveil its role in the discourse of representation. The results reveal the co-occurrences of 'faith' with the vocabulary of religion simulating interdiscursive relations that strategise on theologising the representation of the news participants in attempts to legitimise the allegiance to particular sides in football naturally. Consequently, using faith of religion to call for faith in football may lead to the glorification and derogation of certain football teams that further influence their representation as 'Us' or 'Them'. As this practice may also be accepted as a common practice indicating sports rivalry, it also makes 'faith' a naturalised code without appearing to be ideological.

Risk management report (RMR) has become an important section for a bank's annual reports as it has been used to inform the stakeholders and the public of its stability. Nevertheless, most studies on risk management have yet to place much emphasis on language use nor move-step structure employed in the report since more attention is given to the risks faced by the institutions and how they are solved. This preliminary study aims to explore the move-step structure of risk management reporting in the RMR. To achieve this aim, genre analysis was utilised as a method to investigate how language was used in specific contexts to achieve their communicative purposes. Five RMR of an Islamic bank operating in Malaysia were obtained from its official website and analysed for their communicative content as demonstrated by the move-step constructs. The findings revealed that the RMR adhered to five moves. The findings provide an insight into how an Islamic financial institution's reputation is constructed through the appropriations of the textual conventions in the reports. The present study will benefit researchers and readers of RMR.

Risk management report (RMR) has been mandated in annual reports published by all public listed companies in Malaysia. However, literature on the schematic structure of RMR to communicate factually based persuasion has been scarce. To address this scarcity, the study analyses metadiscourse markers in the corpus data of the RMR of international and local banks currently operating in Malaysia. The study adopted a corpus-based analysis using AntConc (Version 4.0.7) (Anthony, 2022). Hyland's (2005) Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse was adopted as the analysis parameter and SPSS version 24 was used to compute and conduct descriptive statistics and a nonparametric test of Chi-square of the data. The findings suggest that the RMR of both bank categories were more interactive than interactional. The use of hedges was found to be significant, with the international banks employing twice as many hedges than local banks (103 vs 58 per 10000 words). Although both international and local banks employed the same number of hedge types, the difference lies in the density of their use. This study, to an extent, has managed to provide the description of how MDMs are realised in RMR and provide insights into the roles of interaction in risk taking reporting.

Background and Purpose: There is little research on the use of BE-copula in learner compositions in terms of how BE is used, and what functions it performs at specific stages of composition. This study aims to investigate the functions of BE-copula in argumentative essays written by non-native speaker (NS) and native speaker (NNS) learners and determine the similarities and differences in the way the learners use BE­-copula in their essays.   Methodology: This descriptive study employed a corpus-based methodology with the corpus data obtained from the Malaysian Corpus of Learner English (MACLE) and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Only data from L1-Malay learners, which were extracted from MACLE, and which form a sub-corpus of L1-Malay learner argumentative essays, were analyzed in the study. Adopting Hyland’s three-stage structure of an argumentative essay as the framework for analysis, data were analyzed for the distribution of BE-copula and the functions it performed in the learner essays.   Findings: Results from the quantitative analysis revealed a similar pattern in the use of BE-copula between NNS and NS learners, with both groups showing an inclination towards the present forms (is, are) and BE-copula construction. A t-test analysis revealed a more significant use of BE-copula in terms of both forms and functions by the NS learners. The qualitative analysis revealed that even though the NNS learners exhibited almost similar composing elements as the NS counterparts, their texts were stylistically simple, more constrained, less fluent, and effective due to limited syntactic variety. Contributions: The empirical findings from the in depth quantitative and qualitative analyses have enabled more insightful conclusions to be drawn about the NNS learners’ use of BE-copula in their writing. The present study has direct pedagogical implications for the teaching of academic writing in the ESL context.   Keywords: Argumentative essay, academic writing, be-copula, corpus-based, learner corpus research.   Cite as: Abdul Aziz, R., Abas, N., & Yusob, K. F. (2022). A corpus-based study of be-copula in native speaker and non-native speaker learners’ argumentative essays.  Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(2), 21-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss2pp21-43