Unearthing Collocations of Keywords in News Coverage on the Ancient Town of Si Thep, Thailand’s Seventh UNESCO World Heritage Site: A Corpus-based Study
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Abstract
The ancient town of Si Thep in Phetchabun, Thailand, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, boosting tourism and raising the demand for effective English communication in the area. This study’s objectives are to analyze keywords and their collocational patterns in a specialized corpus of news coverage on Si Thep (hereafter: the ST corpus), comprising 30,311 words, gathered from 76 English language news articles, published between April 2015 and February 2024. The results reveal three grammatical categories of keywords: nouns (N = 81), adjectives (N = 12), and verbs (N = 7). The keywords in the ST corpus are integrated into 172 types of lexical collocations, grammatically classified as Adjective + Noun (43.60%), Noun + Noun (37.79%), Noun + Verb (7.56%), Noun + of Noun (6.40%), Verb + Noun (4.07%), and Verb + Adverb (0.58%). Notably, the keywords “local”, “cultural”, “ancient”, “UNESCO”, and “Dvaravati” are associated with the highest number of collocates in the ST corpus. Various pairs of keywords and collocates also represent nine topics of the ancient town of Si Thep, as reported in the news, e.g., Si Thep Overwhelmed by Overtourism, Si Thep Threatened by Oil Drilling. This study may offer alternatives for teaching collocations of specialized vocabulary and developing instructional materials, reflective of authentic language use, as well as methodological guidelines for English teachers in other locations designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
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