Reframing collocational errors as cultural collocational transfer: Insights from a Thai EFL learner corpus

Abstract

This study investigates how culturally grounded conceptualizations shape English collocational usage in learner writing. Drawing on a 4.6-million-word corpus of Thai English as a foreign language (EFL) academic texts, collocations were extracted using corpus-driven association measures, including Mutual Information (MI) and t-score, and were manually validated against the British National Corpus (BNC). Of the 2,239 collocation types identified, 316 types (20,173 tokens) were classified through manual coding as cultural-transfer or culturally interpretable transfer-related forms when Thai linguistic patterning was accompanied by culturally salient conceptual motivation. Rather than viewing non-standard collocations as deficiencies, this study interprets this culturally classified subset as evidence of cultural meaning-making and lexical nativization. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed five domains: Kinship Hierarchy, Religious Practice, Food/Domestic Culture, Localized Service Economy, and Institutional/Media Discourse. Together, these domains accounted for 41% of all non-standard collocations, indicating that cultural transfer represents a systematic rather than incidental phenomenon in Thai learner English. The study contributes to applied corpus linguistics and World Englishes by showing how local cultural schemas are encoded in collocational choices. Pedagogically, the findings highlight the need to foster learners’ intercultural lexical awareness and to develop corpus-informed instructional practices that help learners negotiate cultural identity while maintaining communicative clarity.