Attitudes of Thai graduates toward English as a Lingua Franca of ASEAN

Abstract

This study was conducted with the aim of understanding the attitudes of Thai graduates towards English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in ASEAN, in terms of its acceptability and understandability. Fifty Thai graduate students of King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), whose fields of study were related to engineering, science, and technology, were asked to give responses to different distinct grammatical features of ASEAN ELF. The results, in general, indicate that most of the features received neutral judgment for acceptability. That is, the deviated ASEAN ELF grammatical features were neither completely accepted nor rejected. Furthermore, in terms of understandability, none of the ASEAN ELF grammatical features posed any problems for Thai graduates. The findings lead to a possible conclusion that even though the distinct ASEAN grammatical features are not yet fully accepted, they do not at all harm communication. Thus, the use of ASEAN ELF should not be avoided.

Keywords:

• ASEAN ELF
• distinct grammatical features
• attitudes
• Thai graduates

Notes

1. ‘Understandability’ means how the participants in this study found the ASEAN grammatical features or the sentences containing such features understandable to them.

2. It should be noted that the use of pronouns in this sentence also makes the sentence ungrammatical (construction). We intended to include it since it is a very common feature/construction.

3. Although there can be more than one interpretation of this sentence, the pronoun ‘it’ clearly refers to ‘hands’ in this particular context.