Lexical Collocation Analysis in a Corpus of Research Articles in Physical Education and Sport Science

Main Article Content

Piriya Thaksanan
Thiratchapon Kamsa-ard

Abstract

Understanding how words naturally come together in language is critical for developing fluency and natural expression when studying a second or foreign language. However, many language learners struggle with collocations because they have not been taught how words normally combine. The purpose of this study was to look at keywords and lexical collocations in research articles on physical education and sport science that have been published in reputable journals. A corpus called COPES was created, consisting of 737,901 running word tokens taken from 144 high-quality scientific articles in the field of physical education and sport science. These articles were examined with AntConc version 4.2.4, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis. From this analysis, the first 200 keywords were identified. It was observed that the majority of these words functioned as nouns (64 %), followed by verbs (20.5%), adjectives (14%), and adverbs (1.5%). These keywords were then used as nodes to uncover their collocations. The study found that the most prevalent collocations were noun + noun, adjective + noun, noun + verb, and verb + noun. The study also delved into the pedagogical implications and provided recommendations for future research endeavors.

Article Details

Section
Research articles

References

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