Shifting attitudes towards native speaker and local English teachers: an elaborative replication

ABSTRACT

Students’ attitudes towards native English speaking teachers (NESTs) and local English teachers has been a fertile area of research for many years, but the commonly used surveys focusing on students’ explicit attitudes have been criticised because of the influence of prejudice. An alternative is to use social psychology instruments such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate both explicit and implicit attitudes as in Watson Todd and Pojanapunya (2009. “Implicit Attitudes Towards Native and Non-native Speaker Teachers.” System 37: 23–33. doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.08.002). This article is a direct replication of Watson Todd and Pojanapunya (2009), but, because the sociolinguistic context in Thailand has changed with greater use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) since the original study, we aim to look for differences between the findings of the original study and those of the current study rather than confirm the original, a process we term elaborative replication. Using an IAT with 439 Thai university students, the results show that, in contrast to our expectations, students’ implicit and explicit attitudes towards NESTs have become more positive in the ten years since the original study, a finding that casts doubt on the wider social impact of the ELF movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Student attitudes
• native English speaking teachers
• local English teachers
• implicit attitudes
• Thailand
• elaborative replication

Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank Inthraporn Aranyanak, Nat Cheusuay and Suchaporn Boonyakit for their help in designing the IAT program used.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi under [grant number 2560201].