A Comparative Sentiment Analysis of News Media Discourse on Graduate Communication Skills: Malaysian ESL Versus Native English Perspective

This study examines news media discourse on graduate communication skills through a comparative sentiment analysis of Malaysian ESL and Native English (US/UK/Australia) reporting. Framing Theory guides interpretation by treating evaluative lexical choices as cues that define problems, assign responsibility, and suggest remedies. The study responds to limited comparative evidence that links sentiment totals to the specific word choices and contexts that underpin media framing. A qualitative content research design was used with purposive sampling of 30 news articles (15 Malaysian ESL; 15 Native English) published from 2021 to 2025. Articles were identified via Grok AI keyword-based scraping on X, stored in Google Documents, and analysed using the AFINN lexicon (−5 to +5), POS-based frequency counts, and thematic coding supported by Excel, SPSS, and NVivo. Overall results indicate a moderately positive discourse alongside substantial negative language, reflecting simultaneous promotion of skill value and emphasis on skill gaps. Group comparisons show Native English articles are more optimistic and asset-oriented, whereas Malaysian ESL articles devote more language to deficits and urgency, as confirmed by contextual examples. These patterns suggest that tone differences are systematic framing choices rather than incidental stylistic variation. The findings imply that employability interventions should address both skills development and public deficit narratives, and future research should triangulate sentiment tools, expand outlet coverage, and test longitudinal change across additional soft-skill themes and with larger bilingual corpora to improve generalisability and robustness over time.

framing theory; sentiment analysis; graduate employability; communication skills; Malaysian ESL

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