Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Advanced Research in Education
Year: 2025
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Cultural Collocational Transfer in Thai EFL Learner Writing: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Cultural Conceptualization and Lexical Nativization
Attapol Khamkhien
ABSTRACT:
The present study explores how Thai learners’ cultural and linguistic worldviews influence their English collocational production, with implications for intercultural language pedagogy. Using a 4.7-million-word corpus of Thai EFL academic writing, statistically significant collocations were extracted through Mutual Information and t-score measures and cross-referenced with BNC and COCA corpora. Among 2,253 collocation types identified, 312 (8,197 tokens) were found to reflect cultural transfer from Thai, demonstrating how local conceptualizations shape English expression. Instead of framing these non-standard forms, the study interpreted them as valuable evidence of cultural meaning-making and the natural process of lexical nativization within Thai English. Specifically, four identified main domains of cultural influence, including kinship (e.g., old sister), religion and social practices (e.g., make merit, pay respect), food and lifestyle (e.g., clean food, white skin), and localized borrowings (e.g., air condition, beauty shop) highlight how learners’ linguistic creativity reflects deep cultural roots. These patterns suggest the need for teachers to develop learners’ intercultural lexical awareness rather than focusing solely on error correction. These findings propose the idea of integrating corpus-based and culturally responsive approaches into EFL instruction, encouraging learners to examine authentic language data, reflect on the cultural motivations behind lexical choices, and cultivate communicative competence that balances cultural identity with global intelligibility.
Keywords: Collocations, cultural transfer, Thai EFL learners, intercultural lexical awareness, World Englishes