Attitudes of Thai university students towards Global Englishes-awareness pedagogy

Abstract

While research on Global English (GE) has demonstrated the potential of a new perspective on English language teaching, studies on the impact of GE on students in an English teaching environment in Thailand are relatively rare. This study aims to examine the attitudes of Thai university students from the ELT program towards Global Englishes pedagogy after taking a 15-week Global Englishes-awareness course and the effects of such GE-awareness pedagogy on the students’ attitudes towards three Global Englishes aspects: ownership of English, target culture, target interlocutor. Data was collected from 20 Thai ELT students who have completed a one-semester Global English language teaching course, and their feedback was used to explore their attitude towards the research aims. Using both questionnaire and semi-structured interviews for data collection, the analysis involved a quantitative and qualitative using descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis, respectively. The findings showed that the 15-week Global Englishes-informed pedagogy had significant positive attitudes towards GE awareness. It indicates that the participants’ GE awareness could be developed by incorporating GE concepts into the English classroom, although the concept of native speakerism is still prevalent in their minds. With regards to the GE aspects, firstly, most participants agreed that English is no longer considered to be a specific group's language as there is no connection between English ownership and nationality or the Inner, Outer, or Expanding circle of countries (e.g., British, American). Secondly, the majority of participants reported that the target culture for ELT classrooms should no longer be western cultures; rather, the incorporation of local and regional cultures in addition to global (foreign or western) cultures in their English teaching materials and exercises should be considered. Lastly, most of the participants reported that there is a need for linguistic review toward target interlocutors. These findings implicates that for a better understanding of the realistic use of English and in conformity to global linguistic diversification, English should be considered as a language with multilingual uses, and not just native users as target interlocutors.

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