12th ELIA abstract submission

Hi all.

I’ve just submitted an abstract to the 12TH UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE CONFERENCE ON APPLIED LINGUISTICS (ELIA) conference which will be held in Seville, Spain, July 1-3, 2015 (please see Susan’s earlier post).

My abstract for this conference is the longest one I used to submit because there are some requirements which I’m not very familiar with i.e. proposal must include (i) 5 keywords, (ii) a 300-400 word abstract, and (iii) 4-5 references.) Anyway, wish me luck! Thank you.

“The goal is to teach English, not London is the city with diverse culture. No.”

Sutraphorn Tantiniranat, The Manchester Institute of Education

School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester

Email: s.tantiniranat@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

ABSTRACT:

Thailand is part of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and, as part of the strategic thinking accompanying the imminent establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), is facing the challenges of, and opportunities for, increased intercultural communication – which I take to be interpersonal communication between people from different cultural backgrounds (Gudykunst and Mody, 2002) – within the AEC and between the AEC and other economic blocks. Much of this intercultural communication is likely to foreground English which, legally-speaking, is the only working language of the ASEAN (the ASEAN Charter: Article 34, 2008). However, in Thailand, English has been regarded as a ‘foreign’ language linked to particular contexts and communicators (the native-speakers of target societies such as the UK and the USA) and this foreign orientation to TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) does not seem fully fit for the purposes of English-rich, intercultural communication/ interaction within and beyond the region. English language teachers (such as myself) working at university level now have the opportunity to reconsider how to orient our teaching in recognition of the major role English is playing as ‘the’ language for international/ intercultural communication. Bearing these complexities in mind, as part of my PhD study, I conducted stimulated recall (SR) (Gass and Mackey, 2000, Lyle, 2003) interviews with fellow English language teachers working in a Thai university context. In this paper, I will explore how and to what extent an interculturally-oriented approach to English language teaching features on practitioners’ radars. I will conclude by discussing possible implications for TESOL educators in the ASEAN region as well as other counties in the expanding circle of English usage (i.e. countries using EFL (Kachru, 1996)) as they too (re)consider their paradigm orientation in response to the changing worlds of English around them.

KEYWORDS: Thailand, ASEAN, Intercultural Communication, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Interculturally-oriented approach to English language teaching

REFERENCES

ASEAN. 2008. The ASEAN Charter. Jakarta.

GASS, S. M. & MACKEY, A. 2000. Stimulated Recall Methodology in Second Language Research, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

GUDYKUNST, W. B. & MODY, B. 2002. Handbook of international and intercultural communication, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.

KACHRU, B. B. 1996. World Englishes: agony and ecstasy. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 30, 135-155.

LYLE, J. 2003. Stimulated recall: A report on its use in naturalistic research. British Educational Research Journal, 29, 861-878.