Corpus-based analysis of COVID-19 news reports in an online English newspaper in Thailand

This research explores the corpus-based analysis of COVID-19 news reports in the Bangkok Post, an online English newspaper in Thailand. The study collected 145 news reports published from 11 to 15 March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic for data analysis. The objectives of the study were two-fold: to classify the online COVID-19 news reports into thematic categories and to identify the most frequently used terms that collocated with the term COVID-19 in the newspaper. The analytical framework employed for theme identification was Clarke and Braun's (2013) six phases of thematic analysis, while the concordance program AntConc was used as the research instrument. The findings revealed ten distinct themes through thematic analysis, providing insights into the coverage of COVID-19 in the online newspaper. Furthermore, AntConc 3.5.9 used for the collocational analysis focused on identifying noun collocations related to the virus outbreak. The analysis highlighted the prominence of the term "outbreak," which appeared 51 times.