Discourses of gender and sexuality in elt materials and its influences on Thai queer university students’ identity and motivation

Abstract

While there has been increasing research regarding discourses of gender and sexuality in ELT class materials in the West, there has been little research within this field in Thailand, being limited to heteronormative stereotypes or the effects of gender on language proficiency. Furthermore, there has been little research on how these discourses can influence queer students’ identity construction and levels of motivation in the Thai university context. Therefore, this study explored discourses of both normative and non-normative genders and sexualities in ELT class materials in Thailand via a Queer Discourse Studies (QDS) approach under a social justice lens and gathered student perceptions of how these discourses may influence their identity construction and levels of motivation. This study employed two methods: for the textbook analysis, a mixed-methods research approach was employed, quantitatively coding the frequency of gender-related terms and qualitatively analyzing discourses. For student perceptions, a quantitative survey was employed to gather data on students' gender, racial, and learner identities and their levels of motivation. For one thing, data from the materials analysis reveal that women were underrepresented and individuals of non-normative genders and sexualities were rarely represented. For another thing, data from the survey reveal that while queer students did not construct their gender identities in the English language classroom, they did reconstruct their learner identities and racial identities to a limited extent. In addition, queer students’ motivation can be maintained by ensuring that class content connects to real-life skills and to discourses on gender, sexuality, and race, and by fostering classroom environments that are welcoming, safe, and positive. It is hoped that the data gathered in this study will allow ELT instructors to become more cognizant of selecting more inclusive materials to create more just and accepting classrooms so that students can construct positive identities and maintain high levels of motivation in language learning.