Social Media Communication and The Manifestation of Language Ideologies: A Corpus-Based Approach

This study employed a corpus-based approach to elicit the students’ ideologies of the English language manifested through their learning reflections on language use in Reddit discussion forums. Data collection involved the reflections from undergraduate students through a Google Form, with the responses treated as a corpus named the Reflection corpus. Eventually, a total of 90 responses with over 32,000 words were obtained and analyzed. The data analyses involved keyword analysis and collocation analysis. The results showed that the students’ ideologies of English appeared to deviate from the standard language ideology. This contradicted the traditional view of ELT in the Thai context, which emphasizes encouraging learners to follow the native English speakers’ norms. Overall, although the ideologies of English among students in an innovative ELT context remain under-researched, the implications from the findings suggest how pedagogy, and perhaps the opportunity to engage in real-world language use, can influence students’ language ideologies.