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activities. …And then, about eleven fifteen, eleven fifteen we leave. Eleven fifteen we leave. Eleven fifteen we get on the boat. (Guide J)
In this extract, Guide E rarely used repetition. Indeed, the guides often repeated expressions for
informing tourists who were sitting in different corners of the boats. Further, repetition is useful for
ensuring the tourists’ understanding the message. However, Guide E repeated only the name of the
speedboat while the others repeated words, phrases, clauses, and sentences to accommodate the
tourists.
2. The Tour Guides’ Attitudes toward their Use of Thai English
This part of the findings is taken from interview data, parts II and III, while the first part has
been described in the light of the guides’ general background.
For the second part, the four guides had learnt in English in Thai schools with good Thai
teachers while only Guides E and J had chances to study English in the university level with foreigners.
Being tour guides, they had improved their English with foreigners every day. Further, Guides A and F
accepted their moderate level of oral English, but Guides E and J thought their English was quite well.
Additionally, all said foreign tourists had understood their English; only some foreigners like Russian,
Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese did not understand their Thai English.
For the third part, they had heard the term ‘Thai English’ from their work as there are many
foreign tourists speaking in different accents. Surprisingly, Guides E and J had negative views towards
Thai English. They thought ‘Thai English’ was the notion of broken English used by Thai people who try
to speak English with foreigners. Meanwhile, the term ‘Thai English’ did not surprise Guide A, who did
not find any problems about this variety. Moreover, Guide F found it was cute to hear Thai English
used by Thais. In this respect, only Guide F revealed that he spoke Thai English because he is a Thai
and he speaks Thai and English every day. On the other hand, Guides E and J did not think that they
spoke Thai English because their English went beyond ‘broken English’. Similarly, Guide A, who actually
did not marginalize Thai English at first, eventually thought that Thai English is the lowest type of
English or Tinglish. Here, only Guide F agreed with his Thai English identity, so he accepted that Thai
tour guides using Thai English should improve their English. In the meantime, Guide A felt that only
young tour guides who started working spoke Thai English. On the contrary, in Guide E’s view, any tour
guides speaking Thai English indicate poor English users, and Guide J would like to teach other tour
guides who speak Thai English. These views result in that Guides E and J understood that their Thai
English was classified as their acrolectal level because they hardly faced language problems whereas
Guides A and F agreed with their mesolectal level because they were aware of their language
competence compared to the other guides with the higher level. Additionally, Guides A, F, and J
similarly viewed that it is necessary for Thai guides to speak perfect English as native speakers because
it is a common language for this work. However, Guide E merely said that tour guides should speak
only understandable English because good service is much better than speaking perfect English.
Regarding the three levels of the lectal varieties of Thai English, Guides F and J would like to speak the
same as the Thai guides at the acrolectal level because of their desire to become good English users.
Nevertheless, Guides A and F merely felt okay for those with higher English ability. All four guides
found that the mesolectal Thai guides should have more practice; moreover, they wanted to
encourage the basilectal Thai guides to improve their spoken English.
Though the two guides rated their own English as users of the higher level, their linguistic
features of English while communicating with foreign tourists fell into the mesolectal variety rather
than the acrolectal variety. They still performed grammatical structures of those who could speak
