THAI STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS CHINESE LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ MANDARIN ACCENTS: A CASE STUDY OF A PRIVATE SCHOOL IN BANGKOK
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This study aimed to investigate and compare Thai primary, middle and high school students' attitudes toward their Chinese language teachers' Mandarin accents from affective, behavioral and cognitive dimensions using a mixed-methods research approach. A questionnaire, acceptably reliable with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.78, was used as the main research instrument; structured interviews were secondarily used to supplement the quantitative results. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics of percentage, means, and standard deviations. The overall findings collected from 317 students at a private school in Bangkok through stratified random sampling revealed that the students had very positive attitudes toward Mandarin accents of their native and Thai Chinese language teachers at the highest level; however, the primary school students were most familiar with their native and Thai Chinese language teachers’ Mandarin accents, which allowed comprehensibility, intelligibility, perceived native speaker status, and acceptability as a teacher to exist, and motivated them to pay more attention to the class than the middle and high school students. Speaking like their native Chinese language teachers' standard Mandarin accent more appealed to both primary and high school students. The primary school students were more cheerful to embrace the foreign Mandarin accent spoken by their Thai Chinese language teachers than the middle and high school students. There were two implications as follows:
1) accent familiarity played a vital role in shaping the students' positive attitudes, which concurrently influenced their motivation to learn Chinese. 2) younger learners could accept speaking Mandarin with a foreign accent more as long as it was intelligible, which was similar to English language learning ideology in Thailand.
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