Thai University Teachers’ Beliefs of English as a Lingua Franca and their Multilingual Awareness

Abstract

Teacher’s belief is the field of the study that is wildly studied among scholars in various field of studies, particularly in the field of educational system. This is because it plays an important role in both learning and teaching. Importantly, it controls the way teachers plan the lessons, the decisions they make in their teaching, and their behaviors in the classroom. Therefore, this present study aims to investigate Thai teachers’ beliefs of English language in English as a lingua franca (ELF) context. This is because ELF is the new trend of the study in a Thai context, particularly among Thai English language teachers. It is essential to investigate how they perceive the notion of ELF before the integration of ELF into Thai ELT context. Furthermore, their awareness of ELF in relation to multilingualism and factors affecting their language awareness are to be discovered. The study seeks to provide references for English education practice in Thailand and further benefit the vast number of Thai practitioners of English who will be engaging in international communication in various ways.
To do so, 20 Thai university English teachers in one Thai public university participated in this study. Qualitative research with four research instruments including; semi-structured
interviews, focus groups, documents analysis, and classroom observations, was employed to conduct the study. Then, content analysis with the use of Nvivo12 was utilized to analyzed the data to reveal Thai teachers’ beliefs and their awareness towards ELF in relation to multilingualism. The findings reveal that the majority of the participants believed that English language can be differently used from standard English as long as they can reach the goal of communication. Even though they did not show that they have an explicit awareness of ELF, it is found from the study that they showed their implicit ELF awareness through their pragmatic strategies used in their real-life communication. Nevertheless, these beliefs tended to be limited in the educational context when they held their identities as English teachers instead of English users. It was found that standard English models has still embedded in Thai ELT context due to several factors. Raising ELF awareness among Thai English language practitioners is suggested to prompt them with the shift of English language status from monolingual to multilingual used of English.

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ORCID for Laura Dominguez: orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-2469

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