A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of the Words of Aku and Saya in Indonesian Children Essays

In writing essays, children often have difficulty putting together words to express their thoughts, even for simple themes such as self-introduction and school.A hundred children aged 6 -10 years from various cities in Indonesia have filled out a questionnaire and composed four short essays with the theme of self-introduction.They are directed to the theme and free to write without rules and restrictions.The research aims at figuring out the word patterns in the Indonesian children's essays through linguistic corpus analysis and identifying the thoughts and desires of Indonesian children conceived in the essays.The four hundred Indonesian children's essays have been processed into the Indonesian Children's Story Corpus consisting of 7,815 tokens and 1,650-word types.Based on the frequency analysis, it has been found that the domination of the used word is aku as 5,6% compared to saya merely used as 3,6% of all over the tokens.Based on the collocation analysis, aku in the children's essays tended to use three expressions, namely (1) 11% preference, (2) 7% ownership, and (3) 6% desire of the 440 hits.Meanwhile, saya used to express (1) 25% desire, (2) 19% name, and (3) 18% negative sentences followed by the word of tidak of the 77 hits.The concordance and cluster analyses of the corpus identified three sub-essay topics: selves, families, and hobbies.The essays revealed that most Indonesian children experienced bullying and learning difficulties in their schools.They also necessarily yearned for family relationships and enjoyed quality time with parents.