The effects of data-driven learning on Thai undergraduate students’ knowledge of lexical collocations used in business news

The present study was carried out to (1) investigate lexical collocations used in online business news based on the generated keywords list; (2) examine the effects of data-driven learning on Thai undergraduate students’ knowledge of lexical collocations used in online business news; and (3) to explore students’ perception towards learning business collocations through DDL. The study was commenced with a compilation of 755 online business news from a global news provider BBC.com. The news articles were saved into text files and uploaded onto a corpus software, AntConc, in order to construct the corpus of online business news (COBN) which comprises 678,373 running words. The first 120 keywords were determined in alignment with the set criteria and selected to use as ‘nodes’ for studying their lexical collocations. This process uncovered 335 collocates with six combination types. The most dominant types included Noun + Noun (N = 181; 54.02%) followed by Adjective + Noun (N = 90; 26.86%), and Noun + Verb (N = 46; 13.69%). To assess the effects of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) in teaching and learning of the keywords’ collocations, 51 Thai undergraduate students majoring in Business English were chosen for the study. An eight-week collocations workshop was imparted to the students where they followed DDL procedures and completed collocation exercises to learn the target collocations. The student participants took the pre-test and post-test before and after the pedagogical experiment. The findings from the paired samples t-tests indicated a noteworthy enhancement in students’ performance (t(50) = (11.74), p = <0.001). This significant difference was also evident in each of the three parts of the test: part 1 (t(50) = (7.46), p = <0.00); part 2 t(50) = (8.11), p = <0.001); and part 3 (t(50) = (7.43), p = <0.001). Furthermore, the students’ attitudes towards the implementation of DDL in teaching and learning business news collocations were investigated, using questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire were triangulated with the qualitative data elicited from the interviews. The findings revealed that students held both positive and negative attitudes towards learning English collocations through DDL. However, despite these mixed attitudes, students expressed the view that DDL was a more effective and practical method for learning English collocations compared to other traditional approaches, e.g. learning collocations from dictionaries. These results indicate that DDL or corpus-based language learning has potential benefits for teaching and learning of collocations.