การส่งเสริมความตระหนักรู้ถึงความหลากหลายของภาษาอังกฤษในฐานะภาษาโลก : การรับรู้และกลยุทธ์การนำไปใช้ในการสอนภาษาอังกฤษในฐานะภาษาต่างประเทศในประเทศไทย

Abstract

English has become more diverse with varied non-native Englishes in the world today. Therefore, the use of English nowadays as a global language with global ownership remains undisputed. This has prompted a number of scholars to focus on the associated implications for ELT, especially in ESL and EFL contexts. Thus, it becomes important to raise the awareness of teachers within such contexts about this sociolinguistic transformation in response to the new ways of English interactions and linguistic landscapes. This study therefore seeks to investigate the perceptions of Thai university lecturers towards Global Englishes (GE) and the strategies that they used in their teaching to develop the GE-awareness of their students. These goals were examined by employing a mixed approach of combining quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection. The number of participants who took part in this study were 96 Thai EFL teachers across ten different universities in Thailand. The participants were sampled through purposive sampling, and in total, 96 participants answered the questionnaire (for the quantitative data) while 25 teachers took part in the interview (for the qualitative data). Quantitatively, descriptive statistics including frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations was utilized to analyze the data collected from the questionnaire, while qualitative content analysis was employed to analyzy the qualitative interview data. From the quantitative data analysis, the results reveal an overwhelming positive perception of the participants from the ten universities selected for this study towards GE. The overall mean perception score was positively high (X = 3.47). Dimensionally, the participants illustrated that they felt most positively about the ownership of English and different varieties of English (4.11), followed by Target Cultures (4.04), Performance Assessment (x=3.97). English Teaching and Learning Materials (x=3:78), English Accents (x=3.18), ELI Goals (83.16), Target Norms (8-2.85), and Linguistics Position (x=2.64). From the qualitative analysis, first, the results illustrate three main significant themes concerning the participants' perception towards GEs in ELT in Thai universityclassrooms: (1) EFL pedagogies; (2) EFL materials; and (3) EFL curriculums. Second, in order to prepare learners to catch up with the GE trend, or better still be aware of such changes in ELT and learning, the teachers reported using different teaching activities in their classrooms to foster the GE awareness of their learners. From the analysis of the teachers' interview data, five GE-awareness classroom-based activities were outstanding in their narratives. These activities include: student-foreigner classroom interaction, GE video-based Englishes exposure, on campus meet and greet, GE discourse topics presentation, and English movies. This results therefore implicate that the deeply rooted 'standard' native English language ideology that many teachers, students, and other educational stakeholders have in Thailand needs to be reconceptualised as the English language has evolved based on its global use and users, producing different widely acceptable varieties of Englishes.