Thai hotel undergraduate interns' awareness and attitudes towards English as a lingua franca

The study examines twenty-eight Thai undergraduate hotel interns' awareness and attitudes towards the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in terms of its varieties of spoken English. Drawing upon a case study as a research method, this study employed research tools for data collection including the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and verbal-guise test of the eleven recorded voices whose accents were obtained from native and non-native speakers. The findings reveal that Thai, American, and Japanese accents were identified correctly by the interns. They also expressed their preferences towards the American accent based on four dimensions regarding understandability, acceptability, pleasantness, and familiarity while the Korean one was rated rather low in all dimensions. The interns were, however, well aware of the lingua franca status of their spoken English; and thus, the non-native accents of English were potentially accepted. This study suggests that hotel undergraduate students' awareness and positive attitudes towards varieties of English must be acknowledged and promoted in both English classes and in-house internship training. English teachers and trainers of hotel staff should also be aware of the significance of exposure to accents and introduce undergraduate hotel interns to the varieties of English in order to enhance the mutual intelligibility for effective ELF communication during their internship and at work. This study addresses the integration of the interns' English use and their in-house internships that can offer them authentic experiences in order to equip them with the relevant skills and raise their positive attitudes towards the use of English in the linguistically diverse hospitality industry in the future.