Jumping on the Bandwagon: Thai Students' Perceptions and Practices of Implementing Google Translate in their EFL Classrooms

It is generally accepted that many of today's classrooms have been nurtured by technological advances. Similarly, in language teaching contexts, automated machine translation is widely recognised as one of the most significant breakthroughs in digital technology, contributing to an increase in L2 students' use of Google Translate (GT) to cope with language issues. Previous research found that, despite other technology already incorporated into classrooms, language teachers were still skeptical of students' use of GT to do assignments. This study therefore explored students' perceptions of the explicit use of GT to solve language problems in their classrooms. Data were obtained from an online survey distributed to students in an English course that gives them the freedom to make use of tools and deploy any strategy that enables intelligible communication. The findings from the keyword analysis indicated that the students held a positive attitude towards getting permission to use GT in their classrooms, and that they used GT for a wide range of purposes, in addition to translation. Given the real-world use of GT, this study posits that rather than restricting the use of the tool, teachers should adopt GT in their classes and guide students through the critical use of GT.