A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF GRAMMATICAL COLLOCATION ON ASIAN EFL LEARNERS

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Introduction
Collocations play a crucial role in learners' L2 fluency and accuracy, language appropriateness and word knowledge.Mehmonova (2022) stated that collocation refers to the potential of two or more words occurring in lexical or syntactic relations.
In line with that, Boonraksa and Naisena (2021) pointed out the collocation as the cooccurrence of two or more words to produce new combinations of words with varying meanings depending on the situational context is referred to as collocation.Alsulayyi (2015) claimed that collocation is hard to be mastery by English foreign language Paris, Nirma. et al. (2023) 152 learners.They found that it is hard to recognize collocations and understand how words go together (Chi & City, 2023).While Thewissen's (2008) study revealed that EFL learners were difficult to make combinations of preposition.To further, EFL learners often made improper use of prepositions even at advanced stages of their learning (Tahaineh, 2010).
Collocations are important in both language acquisition as well as language production.They assist producers in better expressing ideas and conveying meaning.
In truth, employing formulaic language is a question of tradition rather than linguistic requirements.Normally, lifelong exposure to linguistic conventions facilitates conscious acquisition.As a result, first-language learners have no difficulties mastering these important characteristics of language.However, due to their limited exposure to the target language, foreign language learners should be taught these conventional strings of words (Umair et.al., 2023).
There were several previous studies on collocation.For instance, Kuo (2009) investigated errors from 98 writing of EFL learners.The results revealed that lexical collocations are easier to acquire rather than grammatical collocations for learners and from among all subcategories.In addition, noun + preposition was the most difficult while noun + verb was the easiest one.Alsulayyi (2015) investigated the English essays written by Saudi students majoring in English in the KSA (The kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and those in the UK (The United Kingdom).The study focused on the production of English grammatical collocations amongst these two groups of students.The results showed that Saudi Paris, Nirma. et al. (2023) According to the statistics of Murti's investigation (Murti, 2023) of corpus-based analysis of grammatical collocations which aimed to find out the comparison between "same with" and "same as", it was found that the term "same as" is far more common than the phrase "same with" due to its higher frequency.Furthermore, the phrase "same with" could be used as a suitable phrase instead of "same as" in at least four contexts or functions.The phrase "same as" used as in relation to, distinctive similarity, as a reference to something, and indicating a state of togetherness.
Whereas the phrase "same as" was often used in at least two contexts or functions such as similar circumstances, conditions, situations, or things, and similar acts.
Consequently, the present study aims to compare the collocation used among Asian leaners and it focuses on grammatical collocations which are: adjective + preposition, noun + preposition, verb + preposition, and preposition + noun.
The objectives of this study was to examine and analyze grammatical collocation employed by Asian EFL learners.Another objective was to find out any similarities and differences of grammatical collocations employed by Asian EFL learners.
In analyzing the data, the Corpus of Contemporary American English was used to compare with the results of prepositions of this study.Finally, the data was analyzed manually to investigate words that collocated with prepositions (of, to, in), and check the accuracy of grammatical collocation used with the Cambridge English Dictionaries Online.

Results
The results of this study are presented as following table.The Asian EFL corpus was analyzed in norm of 1,000 tokens because the paper lengths of each country were different.Table 1 provided both raw and norm tokens of grammatical collocations of noun, verb, adjective collocated with of, to, in and of, to, in" + noun.The results showed that the norm between Thailand (67.17) and China (67.86) were similar, while those countries were different from Indonesia (63.60) and The Philippines (59.39).
There were two freeware programs, CLAWS tagger and Antconc, used to collect quantitative data.Firstly, the prepositions were sought, and then the data were analyzed by using normalization of 1,000 tokens, words.Table 2 showed the top 10 frequency of prepositions in each country.It found that the first top three frequency of prepositions were the same in each country.The prepositions were "of, to, in", while the rest of the prepositions were also similar, but in the different order.prepositions (43.43), then adjective + prepositions (10.97), and there was none of preposition + noun (0.00).
To know the similarities and differences of grammatical collocations employed by Asian EFL learners, this paper compared the data manually shown in the following The table 4 showed that the first top three frequency of prepositions for each country were in the same order.The first sequence was "preposition of", the second sequence was "preposition to", and the third sequence was "preposition in".The arrangements of prepositions after the third sequence were different, but the prepositions were similar.The table 5 showed the most frequent grammatical collocations of adjective + preposition.It found that only the papers from Thai learners that had grammatical collocation used of adjective + prepositions occurred more than once.The first was the adjective + prepositions (of) such as hard, aware, and increasing.For example: The second was the adjective + prepositions (to) such as able, important, and similar.
For Example: The third was the adjective + prepositions (in) such as interested, involved, and successful.For example: It found that there were some of the same nouns that collocated with of, to and in among learners' papers.The first was noun + preposition (of) such as effects and type.For example:

Indonesia
The Philippines The second was noun + prepositions (to) such as students, way, and feedback.For example: Thailand China

Indonesia
The Philippines The third was noun + preposition (in) such as errors, feedback, and accuracy.For example: . A Corpus Based Study of Grammatical Collocation on Asian EFL Learners DOI 10.35905/inspiring.v6i2.6252 This corpus was collected from academic papers of Asian EFL learners studying at Master of Arts in English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Thailand.After collecting the academic papers, there were two free software programs used to analyze the data which are CLAWS part-of-speech tagger for English and AntConc.Finally, the data was analyzed manually.The corpus used in this study called "Asian leaners corpus".It was built from 20 academic papers of 411714 Academic Writing in English Course at Master of Arts in English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University.The papers were legally copyright from the first year of Master of Arts in English students.It is the first form of annotation to be developed by UCREL at Lancaster.The program was the tagging for English text and it has been continuously developed since the early 1980s.The latest version of the tagger, CLAWS4, was used to POS tag approcimately 100 million words of the British National Corpus (BNC).The second program was AntConc.AntConc is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.In the use of AntConc, the present study only focused in the use of keyword list and word list.Keyword list was used to show comparisons between two corpora.While, word list was used to search the most 10 The writing topic was about the academic writing.The papers consisted of 16 papers from Thai (30,477 tokens), 2 papers from The Chinese (4,038 tokens), 1 paper from Indonesian (1,651 tokens), and 1 paper from The Philippines (2,172 tokens).Therefore, this "Asian learner corpus" consists 38.338 tokens (words) from Thai, The Chinese, Indonesian, and The Philippines of academic papers.In analyzing the data, the references and the figures of each paper were excluded.After corpus built, CLAWS part-of-speech tagger for English and AntConc were used to analyze the data.The first program was CLAWS part-of-speech tagger for English used to tag the parts of speech.CLAWS (the Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System) is the part of speech (POS) tagging or grammatical tagging that is the commonest form of corpus annotation.frequency of preposition.Then, this study analyzed the most three frequency of prepositions(of, to, in)on grammatical collocations which are adjective + prepositions

Table 1 .
The statistic details of the corpus

Table 2 .
The top 10 frequency of prepositions

Table 3 .
The top three grammatical collocations Table3showed that the most frequent grammatical collocations employed

table . Table 4 .
The similarities and differences of prepositions

Table 5 .
The most frequent grammatical collocations of adjective + propositions

Table 6 .
Nirma.et al. (2023)ammatical collocation of verb + propositionsNirma.etal. (2023).A Corpus Based Study of Grammatical Collocation on Asian EFL Learners Inspiring: English Education Journal Vol.6 No.2 (September 2023) pp.151-164 ISSN 2721-2130 DOI 10.35905/inspiring.v6i2.6252 The table 6 showed the most frequent grammatical collocation of verb + prepositions.It found that there were the same verbs that collocated with prepositions (to) such as need and related.Need found on paper from Thai and Indonesian learners, while related found on paper from Thai and The Chinese learners.Example of need to: 160 China

Table 7 .
The most frequent grammatical collocation of noun + propositions The table 7 showed the most grammatical collocation of noun + prepositions.