Dissertation project

From Ignorance to Awareness: The Role of Educational Policies in Shaping Learners’ Attitudes towards Global Englishes

The awareness people have about Global Englishes is insufficient in many contexts including Syrian schools and universities. This lack of awareness may lead to negative attitudes especially that it is accompanied with what we may call ‘misleading ideas’ from different sources including teachers and textbooks that consider standard British English to be the ‘correct’ form of English.

Tackling this issue in the present study starts with identifying the attitudes of learners towards varieties of English and the factors that affect them. To do so, analyzing the current situation is required and amendments will then be suggested.

The present research targets a number of Syrian high schools and tackles the English curricula of 10th and 11th grades, using a mixed method approach in which questionnaires, interviews, observations, a verbal guise test, and textbook evaluations are the means of data collection. As for the participants and sources of data, opinions of students, teachers, and stakeholders from various entities and institutions will be considered.

Changes and amendments to the textbooks and the educational policies will be suggested based on the results of the previously mentioned analysis. It should also be noted that the schools are chosen to cover a geographical context as wide as possible in order to achieve results with the highest possible accuracy. Also, the situation related to the awareness of English varieties is very similar in many Arab countries as well as other developing countries which makes the results of this research generalizable to other regions of similar contexts.