Thai Learners’ Attitudes toward English Accents: Fields and Stages of Study
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This study investigated the attitudes of 90 Thai learners toward English accents in relation to differing fields and stages of study, using a verbal-guise test (VGT) and a questionnaire. Respondents listened to and evaluated five speakers of English as a native language (ENL): American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), a second language (ESL): Indian English (InE) and Filipino English (FiE), and a foreign language (EFL): Thai English (ThE). The results reveal that most respondents hold significantly more favorable attitudes toward the ENL varieties than the non-ENL varieties with regard to status, solidarity, and speech. The former group is perceived as standard, proper and prestigious, but the reverse is true of the latter group. The ESL varieties, especially FiE are judged negatively for intelligibility while ThE is perceived as the most intelligible, followed by AmE and BrE. The results also show that Thai learners, irrespective of their field and stage of study, have similar attitudes in terms of social status. However, secondary-school students judge the non-ENL varieties more favorably than university students. These results suggest that teachers should expose students to different varieties of English in the early years of English language teaching (ELT) since they may not have acquired a deep-seated native-speakerism ideology.
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