'My Accent Is Not Okay.': Exploring Thai Students' Attitudes towards English Accents

Native English speakers' accents are generally regarded as ideal models of English accents. However, in real-world communication, where English is used as a lingua franca for intercultural communication among people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, English users inevitably encounter a wide variety of accents. This paper presents part of a broader study that explores the attitudes of Thai students and teachers toward native speaker accents, Asian accents, and their own accents (i.e., Thai accents). Specifically, we focus on the attitudes of 123 Thai students attending a public secondary school in Thailand. We collected data through an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews and analyzed it using descriptive statistics and thematic coding. Our findings indicate that American accents were overwhelmingly viewed as the most favorable and served as the standard for pronunciation. While Asian English accents were generally perceived as intelligible and acceptable, some participants expressed negative attitudes toward their own Thai accents, considering them to be deficient. These findings highlight the importance of raising awareness about the diversity of English accents in both English language teaching and policy.