ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THAILAND: EXPLORING THAI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ VOICES TOWARDS THE USE OF NON-STANDARD ENGLISH IN AN ENGLISH CLASSROOM

บทคัดย่อ

            Given the diversity of the English language nowadays, the issues regarding the use of non-standard English in English language teaching have been argued whether it is acceptable or not. Therefore, it is interesting to conduct a study on voices towards the use of non-standard English. This study, then, sought to investigate Thai university students’ voices towards the use of non-standard English and understand how it had impacts on them. This study employed a qualitative approach to explore the voices and its impacts. Thirty Thai university students who enrolled in English for Airline Business course were selected as participants. To collect in-depth data, the semi-structured individual interview was employed as a main research instrument. Thematic analysis was utilised to organise data while interpretive analysis was employed to interpret data.
            The findings showed that the participants had three main different levels of acceptability of the use of non-standard English including highly acceptable, moderately acceptable, and poorly acceptable. Moreover, the findings revealed that there were five main impacts of the use of non-standard English including boosting confidence, enhancing fluency in speaking English, creating confusion among Thai students, causing embarrassment, and raising awareness on diversity of English which was a new category emerging from this study. The findings also contribute to the understanding of the voices towards the use of non-standard English in the context studied. This study is hoped to provide those in higher education with useful ideas in designing appropriate courses which might benefit students and English language teaching in Thailand.