CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING IN THAILAND AND LATVIA

Aim. The article examines the characteristics of learning English in students from different cultural backgrounds - Thailand and Latvia. Methods. The participants were 95 undergraduate sports science students from Thailand (50) and Latvia (45). The Latvian students' parents had a higher level of education than their Thai counterparts. In the study two questionnaires were used: Leisure time use of reading and writing activities in English (RWA), and English language learning anxiety scale (ELLAS). RWA included five areas of leisure time use of reading and writing activities: Using Internet or e-mail, writing regularly, reading regularly, watching TV or movies, and having a checker; ELLAS consisted of four subscales - Communication Anxiety, Fear of Negative Evaluation, Test Anxiety, and English Classroom anxiety. Results. Latvian students spent more time watching TV, movies, reading regularly, using Internet or e-mail than Thai students (p <.01 and.05). Both Thai and Latvian students experienced moderately elevated communication anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety, and English classroom anxiety. However, Thai students had higher anxiety than Latvian students in all aspects of ELLAS (independent samples t-test, p <.01). Conclusions. Thai and Latvian students showed more similarities in their leisure time use of reading and writing activities in English than differences: They often watched movies and TV, but rarely did reading and writing to improve their English. The finding that Latvian students are more confident in all English language learning situations than their Thai counterparts might result from the fact that in Latvia English is more widespread than in Thailand.