Developing awareness of Global Englishes: Moving away from 'native standards' for Thai university ELT

Despite the continued growth of linguistic diversification and widespread utilization of English by multilingual and multicultural speakers, EFL-oriented pedagogies and native speakerism still profoundly dominate Thailand. To educationally maneuver away from this conceptualization, a new compulsory course called Global Englishes (GEs) was introduced at a Thai university. Using semi-structured interviews and weekly reflective journals for data collection, this qualitative study investigated the perceptions of 20 EFL university students before and after the course. The qualitative content-based analysis revealed an overwhelmingly positive shift in the students’ attitudes towards GEs. Before the course, the students reported that they regarded American or British as the only internationally acceptable English varieties; meanwhile intolerance, dissatisfaction, and depreciation were associated with non-native English varieties. After the course, the students had increased tolerance for English diversity and understood the ways that other English varieties are realistically hybridized or dehegemonized across countries. The findings also illustrated that the students appreciated the value of ‘Thai English’, as they no longer viewed it as a communicative barrier. Implications point toward the need for enhancing students’ awareness of English pluricentricity to push Thailand’s English language teaching towards a more practical track, consistent with today’s use of English in the real world