Preposition-Related Collocation use among British and Malaysian Learners: A Corpus Analysis

The study examines and compares the use of preposition-related collocations in the writing of Malaysian learners of English and British native speakers of English. The study seeks to answer two research questions: firstly, it sets out to quantify preposition-related collocation use among the Malaysian learners of English and British native speakers of English by measuring the statistical significance of the relevant collocation use in each group using Mutual Information (MI) and a t-score; and secondly, the study aims to identify types of collocational errors associated with prepositions studied in the current research. The frequency-based approach was adopted in the study to define collocations, with the nodeand- collocates analysis employed to identify relevant preposition-related collocations. Two references were used to determine the acceptability or otherwise of the collocations: Google Internet search engine results and the online BNCweb corpus. The data revealed that Malaysian learners of English produce more preposition-related collocations than British native speakers of English do. In terms of collocational errors, a stark contrast in the writing of Malaysian learners of English and that of British native speakers of English is apparent, in which preposition-related collocational errors in the Malaysian learner corpus constitute 1% to 7% for certain prepositions, whereas British native speakers’ writing was found to be totally free of collocational errors.