A collocation is defined as an arrangement or juxtaposition of words or other elements, especially those that commonly co-occur, as rancid butter, bosom buddy or dead serious (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2004), the association between two words that are typically or frequently used together (Encarta World English Dictionary, 2006), a habitual combination of words that sounds natural (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1992). There is no doubt that such definitions are intuitively correct when we encounter co-occurrences of words in text and speech. As a component of vocabulary and language learning and as an interesting area for linguistic investigation, collocation study and building of collocation dictionary or corpus have been given considerable emphasis since Cruden identified the repeated co-occurrences of certain words such as 'dry' and 'ground' in the Bible more than 250 years ago (Cruden, 1954;Kennedy, 2000).Clearly, collocation collection and research for language learning is based on empiricism-an approach dominated by the observation of really and naturally occurring data. Noam Chomsky (1959) specifically challenged such language enquiry by stating We constantly read and hear new sentences of words, recognize them as sentences and understand them. It is easy to show that the new events that we accept and understand as sentences are not related to those with which we are familiar by any simple notion of formal (or semantic or statistical) similarity or identity of grammatical frame.He was actually implying that the sequencing of words-characteristics of collocation, is infinite. According to his innatism, such infiniteness or externalised language performance is determined by language competence or internalised knowledge of language due to genetic inheritance. It is therefore not possible and not useful to enumerate all sentences, all collocations for language investigation.However, none would agree that syntactically generated correct sentence will ensure freedom from awkwardness, inappropriateness and ambiguity. What we accept is call it a day rather than name it a day . Language learning is the result not only of surface structural and phonological imitation but also of deeper structural or semantic imitation, and practice plays a key role in this process. (Brown, 2002). Altenberg (1991)

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The definition of the field of educational technology has evolved over 50 years. New inventions and economic globalization increasingly facilitate people's communication for exchange of ideas and collaboration. This work attempts to describe international research collaboration in educational technology for the past 50 years. This article intends to offer an objective and quantitative description through social network analysis. The structure and evolutionary model for the international collaboration network in educational technology is proposed. Economic and geographical factors related to collaboration are analyzed, and the relationship between the number of author origins of^an article and the times cited of the article received is discussed.

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