“We would rather talk about pla ra than hamburgers”: Voices from low-proficient EFL learners in rural Thailand

Phaisit Boriboon

EFL learners who are regarded as low- or under-achievers may in some cases experiencing low self-confidence and self-esteem that manifests itself in an unwillingness to practise or appropriate the discourse imposed on them in the classroom. When discourse in textbooks, task materials and the like is sufficiently disconnected from learners’ sociohistorical backgrounds, the result can be a perception that it is ‘illegitimate’, greatly reducing the meaningfulness of communicative activities with which the students are asked to engage.  Based on cross-disciplinary literature from critical applied linguistics, educational sociology and social-developmental psychology, I hypothesize that mismatches between the discourse that dominates the classroom at an institution in Thailand and learners’ ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1991) have adverse effects on their classroom experience. I propose that learners should be encouraged to construct a language that is meaningful for them by having more opportunity to hybridize and populate the classroom discourse with their own preferred social languages, voices, styles, meanings and intentions (Lin, in press). This practice is likely to bring about more ‘internally persuasive discourse’ than can be achieved with the ‘authoritative discourse’ of traditional education (Bakhtin 1984 as cited in Lin, in press). I conclude this paper with a brief discussion of the procedures I am developing to test the hypothesis.