The Social Psychology of English as a Global Language

Abstract

The Educational Linguistics book series focuses on work that is: innovative, transdisciplinary, contextualized and critical.In our compartmentalized world of diverse academic fields and disciplines there is a constant tendency to specialize more and more. In academic institutions, at conferences, in journals, and in publications the crossing of disciplinary boundaries is often discouraged. This series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. It is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning in educational settings worldwide. It provides a forum for work that crosses traditional boundaries between theory and practice, between micro and macro, and between native, second and foreign language education. The series also promotes critical work that aims to challenge current practices and offers practical, substantive improvements.For other titles published in this series go to www.springer.com/series/5894

The competence and warmth of Thai students’ attitudes towards varieties of English: the effect of gender and perceptions of L1 diversity

“…Much of this research has been conducted amongst university students in Japan (see McKenzie, 2008aMcKenzie, , 2010McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view;Cargile, Takai and Rodriguez, 2006;Sasayama, 2013) and the results again point to the differentiation of language attitudes within status and social attractiveness dimensions. Taken together, the findings of these studies have revealed that Japanese users tend to evaluate L1 English varieties, and especially forms of English spoken in the US, most positively in terms of status.…”

“…This finding is perhaps surprising given the results of equivalent studies undertaken in Japan (McKenzie, 2008a(McKenzie, , 2010Tokumoto and Shibata, 2011), China (Xu et al, 2010), South Korea (Yook and Lindemann, 2013) and Oman (Buckingham, 2015) where university students were repeatedly found to rate the status of their own forms of English significantly less positively than L1 English speech, though in some cases again significantly more favourably than Chinese and Indian English (McKenzie and Gilmore, 2015 early view). Table 2, again demonstrated comparatively favourable warmth ratings for the Thai English speaker, and significantly higher than the Indian, Japanese, Mid-West US and Chinese speakers.…”

“…Following Clark and Schleef (2010) and McKenzie and Gilmore (2015 early view), as a means to capture a more subtle measurement of participant judgements than those achieved on more traditional 5 or 7-point scales employed in much of the previous language attitude research, the listeners in the present study were requested to rate the speakers on a number of bi-polar personality traits by placing an 'x' at a specific position along an 80-point semantic-differential scale (see also Bard, Robertson and Sorace, 1996). Moreover, to allow for a valid comparison with the findings of similar prior research conducted amongst other Asian university students, the traits employed in McKenzie's (2008bMcKenzie's ( , 2010) Japanese study were used to construct the semantic-differential scale in the present study. To avoid any left-right bias in participant responses (Oppenheim, 1992), the positive traits were randomly positioned sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right of the scale.…”

“…Analysis demonstrated a significant effect for differences in 'perceptions of diversity in L1' (in this case, social and regional variation in the Japanese language), with a clear tendency for participants with less sociolinguistic awareness of diversity in Japanese to show lower levels of solidarity towards Japanese English speakers. In light of these results, there have been calls to extend the investigation of this variable by incorporating measures of perceptions of linguistic diversity into the design of language attitude studies conducted in other contexts and amongst different populations (Garrett, 2010;McKenzie, 2010). In the specific case of Thailand, the presence of regional differences within Thai speech, unlike the use of Malay in the southern provinces, is not generally considered a cause of disunity for Thais and there is evidence to suggest that both male and female Thai nationals' attitudes towards regional variation in Thai are generally favourable (Smalley, 1994;Huebner, 2006).…”

“…It would have been useful to have included a greater number of English speech forms as stimulus, and especially more examples of English spoken in the ASEAN region. However, it was clear that if too many recordings were presented, listener-fatigue may compromise the validity of the data collected (see McKenzie, 2010). Further speaker information, together with descriptions of salient phonological features, and to a lesser extent other linguistic features, evident in each of the samples included in the study are detailed below.…”