Cross-cultural perspectives: Cultural encounters in teaching Indonesian to students at Mahad School, Thailand

Abstract

Teaching Indonesian to speakers of other languages (BIPA) is inseparable from the cultural content embedded in the language, so the encounter between the teacher’s and the learners’ cultures often gives rise to differing interpretations of politeness. This issue is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where teachers and learners come from cultures that equally value hierarchy and respect yet express them differently. This study aims to describe and interpret the dynamics of cultural encounters in teaching Indonesian to Thai students at Mahad Islam Emaneeyah School, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand, drawing on the frameworks of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), sociolinguistics, and politeness theory. The study employed a descriptive qualitative approach. Data were collected through participant observation, field notes, and informal interviews over one month (July 2024) and analysed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal three main themes. First, the salim and wai gestures both function as markers of respect but differ in physical contact and symbolic meaning, so that salim was perceived as unfamiliar by the students. Second, the teacher’s expectation of Javanese unggah-ungguh, which encodes hierarchy lexically, did not align with the way Thai students mark politeness through tone, gesture, and bodily posture; hence their use of address forms such as “kamu” toward the teacher cannot be automatically interpreted as impoliteness. Third, explicit, contextual, and dialogic cultural explanation transformed confusion into a space for intercultural reflection. The study concludes that BIPA instruction should integrate linguistic competence with critical cultural awareness, including the ability to distinguish the politeness norms of Indonesian from the local cultural norms of the teacher