Lexical Nouns and Patterning in Thai Disaster News: Implications for EFL Vocabulary Instruction
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Abstract
This study investigates the patterning of lexical nouns and their associated structures—collocations, lexical bundles, and lexical frames—in earthquake-related headlines from Thai online English-language newspapers. It aims to identify prominent noun-based lexical patterns, examine their functions in disaster news discourse, and consider their pedagogical relevance for Thai EFL vocabulary instruction. The dataset consists of 200 English-language headlines related to the March 28, 2025 earthquake in Thailand, collected from The Bangkok Post and The Nation between March 28 and April 10, 2025. The resulting 2,032-word corpus was analyzed using AntConc and Google Colab, supplemented by manual analysis and expert review. The findings show that lexical nouns accounted for 863 words (42.5% of the corpus), representing 230 distinct lexical noun lemmas. Building, earthquake, collapse, and quake were among the most frequent nouns. The lexical nouns were grouped into eight thematic categories, with Infrastructure & Location and Response & Rescue showing the highest occurrence frequencies and the largest numbers of distinct lexical noun lemmas. The analysis also identified recurring collocations, lexical bundles, and lexical frames that encoded information related to structural damage, geographical location, human impact, emergency response, investigation, and public safety. Recurring bundles included collapsed Bangkok building, collapsed Bangkok tower, and death toll rises to, while lexical frames demonstrated how stable lexical elements combine with variable elements across disaster-reporting contexts. Overall, the findings demonstrate that lexical nouns and their recurring patterns contribute to the compact and information-dense nature of disaster news headlines. The findings also support the use of thematic lexical fields, collocations, lexical bundles, and lexical frames as contextually relevant resources for genre-sensitive vocabulary instruction among Thai EFL learners.
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