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.
Songtham Vongvirulh, A. Khamkhien· Research in Corpus Linguisti...· 0 citations
Driven by the forces of globalization, internationalization agendas, ASEAN regional integration, and increasing competition within higher education institutions, English-medium instruction (EMI) has expanded rapidly across Thai universities. Despite its growing prominence, EMI implementation in Thailand remains conceptually contested and pedagogically uneven. This article examines the emergence, conceptualization, and implementation of EMI in Thai higher education by synthesizing contemporary research on policy, pedagogy, language, and assessment. It then identifies five persistent conceptual ambiguities that result in EMI development, including the conflation of EMI with English language teaching, the belief that native-like English proficiency is necessary for EMI teaching, the assumption that EMI automatically improves students’ English proficiency, the perception that EMI guarantees educational quality and internationalization, and the belief that effective EMI requires English-only instruction. The review reveals a range of implementation challenges, including uneven English proficiency among students and lecturers, limited pedagogical preparation, assessment and curriculum tensions, institutional resource disparities, and the absence of a coherent national EMI framework. Taken together, these issues reflect a broader policy–practice disconnect in which internationalization goals often exceed local institutional capacity and classroom realities. Drawing on comparative insights from Taiwan’s Bilingual 2030 initiative, the article argues that sustainable EMI development requires moving beyond monolingual and deficit-oriented assumptions toward multilingual, context-sensitive approaches that integrate language support, disciplinary learning, and educational equity. The paper concludes with policy, pedagogical, institutional, and research recommendations for strengthening EMI implementation in Thai higher education.
A. Khamkhien, Wen-hsien Yang, B. Kanoksilapatham· LEARN Journal : Language Edu...· 0 citations