Investigating eighth-grade students’ lexical creativity in writing argumentative text in Indonesian language classroom

Abstract

Linguistic creativity has been a research topic and has been studied extensively for decades in first, second, or foreign languages. Nonetheless, how it is used in formal Indonesian language classes seems to be underresearched. Thus, this study explores students’ linguistic creativity at the lexis level in composing argumentative texts with student self-selected topics: health, culture, and tourism themes. The research included 12 eighth-grade students’ self-selected topics in argumentative texts analyzed using qualitative content analysis. In analyzing the data, linguistic creativity at the lexis level based on Zawada’s (2006) taxonomy includes formal lexical creativity, semantic lexical creativity, syntagmatic lexical choice, and paradigmatic lexical choice. The study found that the students deployed different lexical creativity strategies in the argumentative text, and the most frequent lexical creativity was formal lexical creativity, followed by paradigmatic lexical choice, semantic lexical creativity, and syntagmatic lexical. Thus, the study suggests that Indonesian eighth-grade students are quite adept at manipulating word forms, and they may benefit from expanding the use of different lexical strategies to deliver their messages, especially in building their arguments.